AMD announced the Radeon RX 5300 graphics card today, an entry-level GPU designed for strong performance in modern PC games at 1080p. The new model appears to be designed with budget-conscious gaming in mind, and the graphics card manufacturer seems to be taking aim at last year’s GeForce GTX 1650 from Nvidia.
PC gamers looking to get similar performance benefits to AMD’s graphics cards for the Xbox Series X and PS5 will probably want to wait until the company’s RDNA 2 cards are revealed in full in the coming months, but fans hoping to get started with a simple graphics card have a new option to look forward to.
RELATED: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Free with Select AMD Processors for Limited Time
The RX 5300 arrives on the cusp of the second generation of RDNA-powered cards from AMD, which are rumored to be arriving soon with performance improvements to the Navi architecture powering the current offerings from Team Red. The RX 5300 shares some design elements with AMD’s existing RX 5500 XT card, with both cards having 22 compute units and 1408 stream processors.
One key difference between the two cards is the new model’s lowered memory, supporting only 3 GB of GDDR6 VRAM compared to the existing version’s 8 GB. While the RX 5300 may not have as many bells and whistles as some of its predecessors, PC gamers can expect the card to be one of AMD’s more accessible options as the company pivots toward newer GPUs.
While AMD’s chief GPU competitor Nvidia typically takes the lead with high-end graphics cards, there’s more to the PC gaming market than sheer power, and the rivalry between the two companies is much closer in the budget and mid-range graphics market. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 came out last year as a budget option, though it flew under the radar somewhat while fans and the industry as a whole focused more on the ray-tracing capabilities of the company’s RTX line of graphics cards.
AMD’s website for the RX 5300 promises gameplay at 69 FPS on the high setting for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, 86 FPS in Battlefield 5 on high, and 70 FPS in PUBG on ultra, exceeding performance standards for an overclocked GTX 1650 by over ten frames per second on average in all three titles. The company hasn’t revealed the card’s price point, but using its competition as a baseline, fans can expect it to land under $200.
A leak from earlier in August suggested that AMD’s upcoming ‘Big Navi’ graphics cards would potentially be outpaced by upcoming Nvidia models, but the RX 5300 seems aimed more toward fans focused on a simple, high-quality 1080p experience with current-generation games, rather than those hoping to include top-of-the-line hardware in their rigs.
MORE: AMD’s Upcoming Graphics Cards May Not Be as Impressive, According to Leak
