AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux Performance

As for the Linux support, the Radeon RX 5500 XT support is there so as long as you are using the latest bits of Linux 5.5 and Mesa 19.3/20.0-devel. When I received the review sample, I was still running Linux 5.4 stable but unfortunately that is not new enough as I was quickly hit with GFX ring timeout errors at boot when Ubuntu was trying to start X.Org. But when switching to Linux 5.5 Git with the new DRM-Next material, those issues went away and since then it's been smooth sailing.

Hopefully the Navi 14 fixes will end up being back-ported to the Linux 5.4 stable series, but for now at least be prepared over the possibility of needing to use Linux 5.5 release candidates / Git (or AMDGPU-PRO on a supported LTS distribution) for the Radeon RX 5500 XT support). On the RADV/RadeonSI Mesa driver side, 19.3 should have you covered while Mesa 20.0-devel is recommended for best performance and features.

With my testing over the past two weeks or so, when using Linux 5.5 Git and Mesa 20.0-devel via the Oibaf PPA, the experience was quite good with these latest driver bits. I didn't run into any OpenGL or Vulkan driver hangs or other issues and the support appears to be on-par with that of the Radeon RX 5700 series.

For this launch-day benchmarking, the graphics cards tested in this comparison included:

- GTX 960
- GTX 970
- GTX 980
- GTX 1050 Ti
- GTX 1060
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1650
- GTX 1650 SUPER
- GTX 1660
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- GTX 1660 Ti
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- R9 285
- RX 550
- RX 570
- RX 580
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- RX 5500 XT
- RX 5700
- RX 5700 XT

The NVIDIA 440.36 driver was used on the GeForce side while for the AMD Radeon GPUs was mesa 20.0-devel via the Oibaf PPA paired with Linux 5.4 (or Linux 5.5 Git in the case of the RX 5500 XT after discovering its 5.4 compatibility ring timeout issue after testing the other hardware) atop Ubuntu 19.10.