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AMD Radeon Pro 5500M

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M: Power for Creatives and Gamers in a Compact Form Factor

Relevant as of April 2025

1. Architecture and Key Features

RDNA – The Foundation of Performance

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500M is built on the first-generation RDNA architecture, which marks a significant step forward compared to the previous GCN. The card is manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process technology, ensuring high energy efficiency and compactness.

Unique Features

- FidelityFX: AMD’s toolkit for enhancing graphics, including Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) and upscaling.

- Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS): Increases image clarity without sacrificing performance.

- No Hardware Ray Tracing: Unlike NVIDIA's RTX, ray tracing is implemented via software through DirectX 12 Ultimate, which reduces FPS.

The card is designed to strike a balance between performance and price, focusing on optimization for professional tasks and gaming at 1080p resolution.

2. Memory: Fast, but Not Revolutionary

GDDR6 and 8GB – Standard for the Mid-Range

The Radeon Pro 5500M is equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit bus. The bandwidth reaches 224GB/s (14 Gbps frequency), which is sufficient for most tasks but falls short compared to top models with HBM or GDDR6X.

Impact on Performance

- Gaming: 8GB is adequate for high-resolution textures in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Hogwarts Legacy at medium settings.

- Professional Applications: The memory capacity allows for working with 3D models in Autodesk Maya or editing 4K video without frequent data loading.

3. Gaming Performance: Comfortable 1080p

Average FPS in Popular Games (High Settings):

- Apex Legends: 75–90 FPS.

- Elden Ring: 50–60 FPS (without ray tracing).

- Call of Duty: Warzone: 65–80 FPS.

Resolutions and Ray Tracing

- 1080p: Optimal choice.

- 1440p: Requires reducing settings to Medium.

- 4K: Not recommended — FPS drops below 30.

- Ray Tracing: Enabling reduces performance by 30–40%, making it impractical.

4. Professional Tasks: For Creatives

Video Editing and Rendering

- DaVinci Resolve: Editing 4K videos with color grading – a smooth experience due to optimization for OpenCL.

- Premiere Pro: Rendering is 20–25% faster than NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti but slower than RTX 3060 due to the lack of NVENC hardware acceleration.

3D Modeling and Calculations

- Blender: Rendering using Cycles (OpenCL) takes 15% longer compared to NVIDIA with CUDA.

- Scientific Computing: OpenCL and ROCm support makes the card suitable for entry-level machine learning.

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output

TDP 85W: Energy Efficiency First

The card consumes less power than NVIDIA's competitors (e.g., RTX 2060 Mobile – 90W), making it ideal for compact workstations and laptops.

Cooling Recommendations

- For PCs: Case with 2–3 fans and good ventilation.

- For Laptops: Models with heat pipe cooling systems (e.g., Apple MacBook Pro 16" 2019–2021).

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile (90W):

- NVIDIA Advantages: DLSS, hardware Ray Tracing.

- Disadvantages: Higher price ($400–450 vs. $250–300 for Radeon).

AMD Radeon RX 5600M:

- Similar performance, but the Pro 5500M is better optimized for professional tasks.

Conclusion: The Radeon Pro 5500M excels in price and energy efficiency but lags in specialized features like DLSS.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply:

- For PCs: At least 500W (Bronze 80+ recommended).

- For Laptops: 100W power adapter.

Compatibility:

- Platforms: macOS (only in specific MacBook models), Windows 10/11, Linux (AMD ROCm drivers require setup).

- Ports: DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b.

Drivers:

- Regularly update Adrenalin Edition for improved stability.

- On Linux, use proprietary drivers for professional software compatibility.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Excellent energy efficiency.

- FidelityFX support for enhanced graphics.

- Affordable price ($250–300).

Cons:

- No hardware Ray Tracing.

- Poor optimization for CUDA-accelerated applications.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the Radeon Pro 5500M For?

Gamers: Those who play at 1080p on high settings without ray tracing.

Creatives: Video editors and 3D designers who value stability and OpenCL support.

Laptop Owners: Looking for a balance between performance and battery life.

Why choose it? For $250–300, it's one of the best options for those who don't need the “bells and whistles” of RTX but require reliability and versatility. In 2025, the card remains relevant for budget builds and mobile workstations.

Prices are for new devices as of April 2025. When choosing, consider the specifics of your tasks and compatibility with software.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

November 2019

Model Name

Radeon Pro 5500M

Generation

Radeon Pro Mac

Base Clock

1000MHz

Boost Clock

1450MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x8

Transistors

6,400 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

7 nm

Architecture

RDNA 1.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

8GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1500MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

192.0 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

46.40 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

139.2 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

8.909 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

278.4 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

4.365 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1536

L2 Cache

2MB

TDP

85W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.5

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

4.365 TFLOPS

Blender

Score

403

Vulkan

Score

34633

OpenCL

Score

36453

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro RTX 3000 Max Q

4.759 +9%

Radeon Pro 575

4.579 +4.9%

Radeon Pro 5500M

4.365

GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB

4.287 -1.8%

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max Q

4.183 -4.2%

Blender

GeForce RTX 2060

1506.77 +273.9%

Arc A550M

848 +110.4%

Quadro T1000 Mobile GDDR6

415 +3%

Radeon Pro 5500M

403

GeForce GT 1030

45.58 -88.7%

Vulkan

Radeon Pro Vega II Duo

98446 +184.3%

Radeon RX 6700S

69708 +101.3%

Radeon RX 580 2048SP

40716 +17.6%

Radeon Pro 5500M

34633

GeForce 940M

5522 -84.1%

OpenCL

Radeon RX 7600 XT

77989 +113.9%

GeForce RTX 3050 OEM

60909 +67.1%

Radeon Pro 5500M

36453

FirePro W7000

18176 -50.1%

FirePro M5100

10692 -70.7%