With the launch of the RX 550, AMD is finally returning in force to the low end of the market. While there were various graphics cards in this segment before, they were all based on much older GCN 1 or GCN 2 designs. The new Polaris 12 GPU powering the card offers the same GCN 4 architecture powering it’s more powerful cousins. Following up on their higher end RX 500 offerings, Powercolor is revealing their new RX 550 Red Dragon.
While the Red Dragon might sound impressive, it sits below the Red Devil brand carried by the higher end RX 500 cards. As a Polaris 12 GPU, it features 512 stream processors, 32 TMUs and 16 ROPs. Built on the latest 14nm FinFET process from GlobalFoundries, it’s an update for the aging Cape Verde Pro powering the HD 7750 launched back in 2012 though it fills the performance segment left by Oland and the HD 7790. The card comes with a 1190 MHz core clock with 7.0 Gbps of 2GB GDDR5 over a 128-bit memory interface.
As a latest gen GCN 4 card, it features all of the nice features like HEVC encode and decode, DirectX 12, Vulkan, Radeon FreeSync, and Liquid VR. The card itself is a relatively simple single fan cooler design with a one ball + one sleeve fan. Performance is claimed to be double that of the R7 250.
