AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT vs AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop)

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is a mid range graphics card for desktop PCs. It is using the Navi 24 graphics chip which uses the RDNA 2 architecture and is manufactured in 6nm at TSMC. The 6500XT offers 16 compute units (CUs = 1,024 shaders) and 4 GB GDDR6 dedicated VRAM connected via a 64 Bit interface (143.9 GB/s max).

The performance of the Radeon RX 6500 XT is similar to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super, but slower than an older Radeon RX 5500 XT. Therefore, the card is best suited for 1080p and high presets of 2021 games (see below for actual game benchmarks).

The power consumption is rated at 107 Watt (TGP) and therefore similar to a GTX 1650 Super (100 Watt).

AMD Radeon RX 550 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 550 is mobile mid-range graphics card for laptops based on the Polaris 12 chip . It is manufactured in an improved 14 nm FinFET process at Globalfoundries or Samsung. The Polaris 12 chip (codename Lexa) is a smaller chip than the Polaris 11 and 21 and uses the improved 14nm process that allows higher clock rates than the first generation (Radeon RX 400 series). It features 640 shaders (10 CUs) and (at least in the Pavilion 15t) all cores are activated in the mobile version (where 512 are activated in the desktop RX 550).

According to the specified peak performance, the chip should be similar fast as a Radeon Pro 455 in the MacBook Pro 2016. In our tests it reaches the Radeon Pro 455 and bests the Nvidia GeForce MX150, but stays behind the GeForce GTX 1050.

The features of the Radeon RX 550 are identical to the faster RX 460 and all other Polaris chips. See more details on the Polaris architecture here.

The power envelope of the faster Radeon Pro 460 is rated at 35 Watt according to the AMD blog post. In our tests with The Witcher 3, the GPU needed in the Pavilion 15t 80 Watt and positiones itself between the much more power efficient MX150 and the GTX 1050.