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AMD Radeon RX 5300

AMD Radeon RX 5300: A Budget Graphics Card for Gamers and More

Let’s determine whether this model is worth considering in 2023.

Architecture and Key Features

RDNA: The Foundation of Performance

The AMD Radeon RX 5300 is built on the RDNA (Navi 14) architecture — the first generation of AMD's revolutionary design, which replaced the outdated GCN. It is manufactured using a 7 nm process (TSMC), providing enhanced energy efficiency and compactness.

Unique Features:

- FidelityFX: A set of technologies for graphics improvement, including Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) and upscaling (FSR 1.0).

- Radeon Image Sharpening: Enhances image clarity without a significant performance hit.

- DirectX 12 Ultimate: Support for modern APIs, though ray tracing is implemented at a software level through shader calculations, which drastically reduces FPS.

Important: The RX 5300 does not come with hardware Ray Accelerators (as found in RDNA 2/3), making ray tracing in games a rather experimental option.

Memory: Speed vs. Capacity

GDDR6 and Narrow Bus

The card uses 3 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 96-bit bus. The bandwidth is 168 GB/s (14 Gbps × 96 bits / 8). In comparison, the competitor GTX 1650 Super has a 128-bit bus and 192 GB/s.

Impact on Gaming:

- 3 GB is critical for modern titles. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Hogwarts Legacy can experience drops due to insufficient VRAM at high settings.

- 168 GB/s is adequate for 1080p, but limitations arise at 1440p.

Advice: Use medium or low texture settings to avoid framebuffer overflows.

Gaming Performance

1080p — Comfortable Zone

Benchmark tests show the following results (average FPS, “High” settings):

- Fortnite: 75-90 FPS (no ray tracing).

- Apex Legends: 60-70 FPS.

- Red Dead Redemption 2: 45-55 FPS (requires optimization).

- Cyberpunk 2077: 30-40 FPS (FSR 1.0 on “Quality” raises it to 50 FPS).

Ray Tracing: In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, activating RT drops FPS to 22-28, making it ineffective.

Resolutions above 1080p:

- 1440p: Requires lowering settings to “Medium.” For example, Call of Duty: Warzone achieves 40-50 FPS.

- 4K: Not recommended — insufficient VRAM and low bandwidth.

Professional Tasks

Not Gaming, but Basic Loads

- Video Editing: In Premiere Pro, the RX 5300 handles 1080p video rendering thanks to support for OpenCL and AMD AMF. However, 4K timelines will lag significantly.

- 3D Modeling: In Blender, the card shows modest results. Rendering a BMW scene takes about 25 minutes (compared to ~7 minutes on an RTX 3060).

- Scientific Calculations: OpenCL support allows leveraging the GPU for basic machine learning, although 3 GB of memory is a serious limitation.

Conclusion: For professionals, this is a temporary solution. It's better to spend extra for a model with 8+ GB of VRAM.

Power Consumption and Heat Output

TDP and Recommendations

- TDP: 100 W. Power is supplied via a 6-pin connector.

- Power Supply: Minimum 400 W (450 W recommended as a buffer).

- Cooling: Most models (e.g., ASUS Phoenix) use a compact cooler with a single fan. Under load, the temperature is 70-75°C.

Case Suggestions:

- Minimum case with good ventilation (2-3 fans).

- Avoid cramped installations — the card is sensitive to overheating.

Comparison with Competitors

Focus on the Budget Segment

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 Super: 4 GB GDDR6, 128-bit bus. Comparable in FPS but 10-15% more expensive.

- AMD RX 5500 XT (4 GB): Higher performance (+15%) and more memory, but with a TDP of 130 W.

- Intel Arc A380: 6 GB GDDR6, better in DX12, but has driver and stability issues.

Why Choose RX 5300?

- The lowest price in the segment (starting from $120 used).

- Support for FSR 1.0/2.0 for upscaling.

Practical Tips

Building a System

- Power Supply: 450 W (80+ Bronze). Examples: be quiet! System Power 9, EVGA 450 BR.

- Platform: Compatible with PCIe 4.0, but performs on PCIe 3.0 without loss.

- Drivers: Use Adrenalin 23.x with automatic updates disabled (known issues with software reinstallation).

Important: For motherboards with UEFI, update the BIOS to the latest version to avoid compatibility issues.

Pros and Cons

Strengths:

- Low price.

- Energy efficiency (7 nm).

- Support for FSR to boost FPS.

Weaknesses:

- Only 3 GB VRAM.

- No hardware Ray Tracing.

- Limited performance at 1440p.

Final Conclusion

Who is the RX 5300 For?

- Gamers with a 1080p 60 Hz Monitor: Ideal for CS2, Fortnite, and Apex Legends on medium settings.

- Owners of Older PCs: As an upgrade for systems with processors like Ryzen 3 3100 or Core i3-10100.

- Budget Builds: For those limiting their total system budget to $300-400.

Alternatives: If budget permits, RX 6600 or Intel Arc A750 will provide more future-proofing. But if maximum savings are needed — the RX 5300 remains an option for less demanding tasks.

Author: Technical Expert, updated October 2023.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

May 2020

Model Name

Radeon RX 5300

Generation

Navi

Base Clock

1327MHz

Boost Clock

1645MHz

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

3GB

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.

96bit

Memory Clock

1750MHz

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.

168.0 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.

52.64 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.

144.8 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.

9.265 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.

289.5 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.

4.725 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.

1408

L2 Cache

1536KB

TDP

100W

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

1x 6-pin

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.

Suggested PSU

300W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

4.725 TFLOPS

Blender

Score

91.04

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Quadro P3200 Max Q

4.931 +4.4%

Radeon RX 580 Mobile

4.864 +2.9%

Radeon RX 5300

4.725

GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile

4.516 -4.4%

Radeon RX 470 Mobile

4.311 -8.8%

Blender

GeForce RTX 2060

1506.77 +1555.1%

Arc A550M

848 +831.5%

Tesla P4

429 +371.2%

Quadro P2000

194.8 +114%

Radeon RX 5300

91.04