AMD Radeon RX 6550M vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 vs AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT

AMD Radeon RX 6550M

The AMD Radeon RX 6550M is a mobile entry-level graphics card based on the Navi 24 chip (RDNA 2  architecture) manufactured in the modern 6nm process. It features 1024 cores (16 CUs - compute units) and 4 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 64 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 16 MB Infinity Cache. The game clock speed is specified at 2560 MHz. Compared to the RX 6500M, the 6550M offers an increased core clock (+17%) but the memory bus i cut in half (64 versus 128 Bit).

The performance should be slightly higher than an average RX 6500M, as long as the memory bandwidth reduction wont has a too big impact.

The Navi 24 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 6nm process and should offer a good energy efficiency. The RX6550M is specified at a TDP of 50 - 80 Watt and therefore best suited for normal multimedia laptops.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is a mid-range desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 128 Bit memory bus. It offers 2,560 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2060 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3050 is specified at 130 Watt and therefore better than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).

AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT

The AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT is a mobile high-end graphics card for gaming laptops. It uses the Navi 22 chip based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. It uses all 2,560 shaders (= 40 CUs), 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs and therefore is similar to the desktop Radeon RX 6700 XT. The 192 Bit memory system connects 12 GB GDDR6 with 18 Gbps memory speed. Furthermore, the RX6850MXT includes 96 MB Infinity Cache. AMD specified 2.463 GHz game clock for 13.3 TFLOPS theoretical performance (SP) at a TDP of 135-165 Watt. The difference to the previous RX 6800M is the slightly increased clock speed of the CPU and GPU.

The gaming performance of the RX 6850M XT should be slightly faster than the old RX 6800M which positioned itself between a RTX 3070 and 3080 for laptops. For 

The Navi 22 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process.