With the release of the budget RX 5500 XT, AMD started to fill out the bottom two-thirds of its product stack, bringing much-needed competition into that segment. The graphics card arrived with 4GB and 8GB variants ($169 and $199 respectively), and in our RX 5500 XT review, some titles--namely Forza Horizon 4, Battlefield V, Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider--the 4GB variant performed considerably slower when running Ultra settings. The initial takeaway from this was the 4GB capacity is simply not enough for those titles, which is correct. However, there's more to it.
German website pcgameshardware.de recently tested both RX 5500 XT versions using PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0. The results were a bit surprising. They found that when the 4GB card's VRAM buffer was full, running on a PCIe 4.0 slot improved performance by reducing the impact of using VRAM. The 8GB also displayed minor improvements from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0, but the 8GB capacity is what makes that card shine, since the extra memory means the card didn't have to dump data off of the faster VRAM as often.
German website pcgameshardware.de recently tested both RX 5500 XT versions using PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0. The results were a bit surprising. They found that when the 4GB card's VRAM buffer was full, running on a PCIe 4.0 slot improved performance by reducing the impact of using VRAM. The 8GB also displayed minor improvements from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0, but the 8GB capacity is what makes that card shine, since the extra memory means the card didn't have to dump data off of the faster VRAM as often.
