AMD has been providing stiff competition for Intel in the workstation CPU market, with the Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper now delivering a lot more performance for the money for professional content creators. But the company’s pro-grade graphics haven’t been giving NVIDIA such a hard time. The Radeon Pro WX 8200 posed a short-lived challenge to the Quadro P4000, until the RTX 4000 came along, and then the Radeon Pro W5700 arrived to take over the battle, with only some success. Now, we have its little brother, the Radeon Pro W5500.

The W5500 is another AMD graphics card based on its 7nm process and the Navi GPU family, like the W5700. However, it uses a more recent spin of Navi, the Navi 14 RDNA GPU. It only has 22 compute units and 1,408 stream processors, compared to the W5700’s 36 and 2,304 respectively. However, it still comes with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, so supports resolutions up to 8K, although the interface is merely 128-bit making bandwidth half as much.

But the W5500 is also less than half the price of the W5700, so it is not competing against the market leading NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000. In fact, NVIDIA doesn’t have an RTX card aimed at this price level, so the Quadro P2200 from the Pascal GPU generation is the main opposition for almost exactly the same money. This gives the W5500 a clear window of opportunity, because if it can deliver better performance, it also has more frame buffer (the P2200 only has 5GB), so it could be a budget contender for professional content creation. Let’s find out how it fares.

GPU	AMD Radeon Pro W5700	AMD Radeon Pro W5500	NVIDIA Quadro P2200
Compute Units	36	22	80
Stream Processors / CUDA cores	2,304	1,408	1,280
GPU Architecture / Variant	Navi 10 XL	Navi 14 PRO XL	Pascal GP106
Base Clock	1,183 MHz	1,354 MHz	1,000 MHz
GPU Boost Clock	1,930 MHz	1,855 MHz	1,493 MHz
Total Video memory	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	5 GB GDDR5X
Memory Clock (Effective)	1,750 (14,000) MHz	1,750 (14,000) MHz	1,251 (10,000) MHz
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/sec	224 GB/sec	200.2 GB/sec
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit	160-bit
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	16nm
TDP	205 W	125 W	75 W
Display Outputs	5 x Mini-DisplayPort 1.4, USB-C	4 x DisplayPort 1.4	4 x DisplayPort 1.4
Display Resolution	5 @ 1920×1080 5 @ 3840×2160 5 @ 5120×2880 1 @ 7680×4320 (all at 60Hz)	4 @ 1920×1080 4 @ 3840×2160 4 @ 5120×2880 1 @ 7680×4320 (all at 60Hz)	4 @ 1920×1080 4 @ 4096×2160 4 @ 5120×2880 (all at 60Hz)
Software API Support	DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.1, Vulkan 1.2	DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.1, Vulkan 1.2	DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2, CUDA 6.1

AMD Radeon Pro W5500 Retail Price: £404.30

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