NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 5500M

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 12GB is high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 8,704 shaders and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory. Compared to the older 10 GB model, the 12 GB model offers more bandwidth and therefore a higher TDP.

The gaming performance in 4k is clearly better than the old GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (approximately 15% faster). Therefore, even demanding games should run with maximum detail settings in 4k. Enabling raytracing will however reduce the framerate and therefore maximum details won't be playable. 

The RTX3080 is produced in 8nm at Samsung and rated at 350 Watt.

AMD Radeon RX 5500M

The AMD Radeon RX 5500M (or RX 5500 Mobile Graphics) is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 1,408 cores clocked at 1,645 MHz (max. Boost, 1448 MHz max game clock) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (14 Gbps).

The Navi 14 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the RX5500M should be between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and the normal GeForce GTX 1660 Ti according to AMD. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) with high or maximum settings in demanding games. AMD states that the 5500M should be able to hit a performance of up to 4,6 TFLOPS (theoretical) versus 5,2 (+12%) of the desktop Radeon 5500. In our gaming benchmarks with the MSI Alpha 15, the RX 5500M however was slightly slower on average than the older GTX 1060 (mobile) and therefore between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

The chip is specified with a TDP of 85 Watt and therefore 20 Watt more than the slower clocked Radeon RX5300M. In games the power consumption of the chip ranges between 64 and 105 Watt (Ghost Recon gameplay recorded with HWInfo64). In the MSI Alpha 15 the power consumption was clearly higher than the GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and only slightly below a normal GTX 1660 Ti (measured in The Witcher 3 with an external monitor).