AMD Instinct MI300X vs NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation Comparison

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The sole head-to-head benchmark in the database is Geekbench OpenCL, and the result is a decisive win for the AMD Instinct MI300X. It scores 317,994 against the NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation's 160,786. That is a delta of 97.8 percent — the MI300X nearly doubles the RTX 4500's raw compute output in this OpenCL workload. In absolute terms, the gap is 157,208 points, which is the kind of margin that separates entirely different performance classes rather than adjacent product tiers.

The MI300X's score places it in the 100th percentile of all GPUs tracked in this database. That means it sits at the very top of the distribution — no other GPU in the dataset scores higher. Its closest rival, the NVIDIA B200, averages 345,482 points, which is 8 percent ahead of the MI300X. The NVIDIA H200 NVL also beats it, averaging 334,891 points, a 5 percent advantage. But the MI300X clears the NVIDIA L40S by 7.5 percent (295,763) and the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation by 10.7 percent (287,237). So while the MI300X does not hold the absolute crown against every accelerator in the database, it outruns the entire Ada workstation lineup and most of NVIDIA's data-center parts.

The RTX 4500 Ada Generation, by contrast, sits at the 97th percentile. That is still elite — it is in the top 3 percent of all GPUs — but the company it keeps is very different. Its nearest rivals are the NVIDIA RTX A5500 at 165,217 (0.5 percent behind), the AMD Radeon PRO W7800 at 164,894 (0.7 percent behind), the AMD Radeon Pro W6900X at 168,574 (1.5 percent ahead), and the NVIDIA A100 PCIe 40 GB at 162,504 (2.2 percent behind). The RTX 4500's average benchmark score across OpenCL and Vulkan is 166,094. That puts it in the same performance envelope as last-generation flagship workstations and mid-range data-center accelerators, not in the same league as the H200 or B200.

What stands out in the head-to-head is not just that the MI300X wins, but how lopsided the win is. A 97.8 percent delta in a single benchmark is not a marginal edge; it reflects fundamentally different design targets. The MI300X is built to saturate massive parallel workloads with 192 GB of HBM3 memory and 19,456 shading units. The RTX 4500 is a 24 GB workstation card with 7,680 shading units. The OpenCL test rewards raw throughput, and the MI300X has more than double the shading units and more than double the thermal envelope to feed them.

Where Each One Wins

The AMD Instinct MI300X wins the only benchmark where both cards appear, and it wins by a landslide. In OpenCL compute, it delivers 317,994 points versus the RTX 4500's 160,786. That is a 97.8 percent advantage. If your workload is heavily parallel compute — think large-scale matrix operations, scientific simulation, or AI inference — the MI300X is the clear choice based on this metric. Its 100th percentile ranking reinforces that it is near the top of the entire GPU hierarchy.

The NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation has no benchmark wins against the MI300X in this dataset. However, it does have a second benchmark entry — Geekbench Vulkan — scoring 171,401 points. That is higher than its OpenCL score of 160,786, suggesting that in Vulkan-based workloads, the RTX 4500 performs relatively better than it does in OpenCL. But since the MI300X has no Vulkan score, we cannot directly compare them there. The RTX 4500 also has features the MI300X lacks entirely: 60 RT cores, 240 tensor cores, 80 ROPs, and four DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. It supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4. The MI300X lists "N/A" for all three APIs and has no display outputs. So for ray-traced rendering, real-time graphics, or any workload that needs a display connection, the RTX 4500 is the only functional option.

The practical split is stark. The MI300X is a compute monster with no graphics output and no consumer API support. The RTX 4500 is a workstation card that can drive monitors, accelerate DCC applications with RT and tensor cores, and still deliver respectable compute — 39.63 TFLOPS FP32 versus the MI300X's 81.72 TFLOPS. If you need to see the result on a screen or use graphics APIs, the RTX 4500 wins by default.

Architecture Differences

The two cards share a 5 nm process node and the same foundry, TSMC, but that is where the similarities end. The MI300X uses AMD's CDNA 3.0 architecture on a chip codenamed Aqua Vanjaram. The RTX 4500 uses NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace architecture on the AD103 chip. These are fundamentally different designs targeting different problem domains.

The MI300X is built for throughput at scale. It packs 153,000 million transistors on a 1017 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 150.4 million per square millimeter. The RTX 4500 has 45,900 million transistors on a 379 mm² die, for a density of 121.1 million per square millimeter. The MI300X's die is nearly three times larger and holds more than three times the transistors. That scale translates directly into compute resources: 19,456 shading units and 1,216 texture mapping units on the MI300X versus 7,680 shading units and 240 TMUs on the RTX 4500. The MI300X has no ROPs — it is not designed to rasterize — while the RTX 4500 has 80.

Memory is another chasm. The MI300X has 192 GB of HBM3 on an 8192-bit bus, delivering 5.32 TB/s of bandwidth. The RTX 4500 has 24 GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, delivering 432.0 GB/s. That is a 12.3x difference in bandwidth and an 8x difference in capacity. For datasets that exceed 24 GB — which is common in large language model inference or high-resolution scientific data — the RTX 4500 cannot even load the working set.

Clock speeds tell the opposite story. The RTX 4500 runs at a 2070 MHz base and 2580 MHz boost. The MI300X runs at 1000 MHz base and 2100 MHz boost. The RTX 4500's higher clocks help it extract more per-shader performance, but it simply has far fewer shaders to work with. The FP32 output is 39.63 TFLOPS for the RTX 4500 versus 81.72 TFLOPS for the MI300X. Both cards list FP16 at the same rate as FP32 (1:1), meaning neither uses a dedicated low-precision path that doubles throughput.

The power envelope is equally divergent. The MI300X has a TDP of 750 W and a suggested PSU of 1150 W. The RTX 4500 has a TDP of 210 W and a suggested PSU of 550 W. The MI300X is an OAM module with no power connectors of its own; the RTX 4500 is a dual-slot card that also lists no power connectors, but its physical format is a standard 245 mm (9.6 inches) PCIe card. The RTX 4500 uses PCIe 4.0 x16 while the MI300X uses PCIe 5.0 x16.

FAQ

Q: Which card has better raw compute performance?

A: The AMD Instinct MI300X. Its Geekbench OpenCL score is 317,994 versus 160,786 for the RTX 4500, a 97.8 percent delta. The MI300X also delivers 81.72 TFLOPS FP32 versus 39.63 TFLOPS.

Q: Can the MI300X output video to a display?

A: No. The MI300X has no display outputs listed, and its API support for DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan is listed as "N/A". The RTX 4500 has four DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and supports all three APIs.

Q: Which card has more memory bandwidth?

A: The MI300X by a wide margin. It has 5.32 TB/s of bandwidth from 192 GB of HBM3 on an 8192-bit bus. The RTX 4500 has 432.0 GB/s from 24 GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus.

Q: How do the two cards compare in power consumption?

A: The MI300X has a TDP of 750 W and requires a suggested 1150 W PSU. The RTX 4500 has a TDP of 210 W and a suggested 550 W PSU. The MI300X uses more than three times the power.

Q: Does the RTX 4500 support ray tracing?

A: Yes. The RTX 4500 has 60 RT cores and 240 tensor cores, and it supports DirectX 12 Ultimate. The MI300X lists no RT cores or tensor cores.

Q: Which card is closer to its nearest rival in performance?

A: The RTX 4500. Its nearest rival, the NVIDIA RTX A5500, is only 0.5 percent behind at 165,217 points. The MI300X's nearest rival, the NVIDIA B200, is 8 percent ahead at 345,482 points.

The Verdict

The data draws a clear line. The AMD Instinct MI300X is for workloads that need massive memory capacity and extreme parallel throughput — 192 GB of HBM3 at 5.32 TB/s, 81.72 TFLOPS FP32, and a 100th percentile benchmark ranking. It wins the only head-to-head benchmark by 97.8 percent. If your task is large-scale compute that fits in OpenCL, the MI300X is objectively superior in this dataset.

The NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation is for professionals who need graphics acceleration, display output, or API support. It has 60 RT cores, 240 tensor cores, four DisplayPort outputs, and support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4. The MI300X has none of those. The RTX 4500 also consumes 210 W versus 750 W, making it far easier to integrate into a standard workstation.

But there is no benchmark where the RTX 4500 beats the MI300X. In OpenCL, it loses by 157,208 points. In Vulkan, it scores 171,401, but the MI300X has no Vulkan score to compare. The RTX 4500's nearest rivals are all within 2.2 percent of its average score, which means it competes in a dense field of workstation and data-center mid-rangers. The MI300X's nearest rivals are the B200 and H200, which are 8 and 5 percent ahead respectively — a different performance tier entirely.

Choose the MI300X if your work is compute-bound and you do not need to see the results on a monitor. Choose the RTX 4500 if you need a graphics card that also computes, or if your software requires CUDA-specific features like RT cores or tensor cores. The benchmark data gives the compute crown to AMD; the feature set gives the workstation crown to NVIDIA.

Specification Differences

| Field | AMD Instinct MI300X | NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation |

|-------|---------------------|-------------------------------|

| Architecture | CDNA 3.0 | Ada Lovelace |

| Chip | Aqua Vanjaram | AD103 |

| Generation | Instinct (MIx) | Workstation Ada |

| Transistors | 153,000 million | 45,900 million |

| Die Size | 1017 mm² | 379 mm² |

| Transistor Density | 150.4M / mm² | 121.1M / mm² |

| Base Clock | 1000 MHz | 2070 MHz |

| Boost Clock | 2100 MHz | 2580 MHz |

| Memory Clock | 1300 MHz 5.2 Gbps effective | 2250 MHz 18 Gbps effective |

| Memory Size | 192 GB | 24 GB |

| Memory Type | HBM3 | GDDR6 |

| Memory Bus | 8192 bit | 192 bit |

| Memory Bandwidth | 5.32 TB/s | 432.0 GB/s |

| Shading Units | 19456 | 7680 |

| TMUs | 1216 | 240 |

| ROPs | 0 | 80 |

| RT Cores | None | 60 |

| Tensor Cores | None | 240 |

| Pixel Rate | 0 MPixel/s | 206.4 GPixel/s |

| Texture Rate | 2,553.6 GTexel/s | 619.2 GTexel/s |

| FP32 | 81.72 TFLOPS | 39.63 TFLOPS |

| FP16 | 81.72 TFLOPS (1:1) | 39.63 TFLOPS (1:1) |

| TDP | 750 W | 210 W |

| Slot Width | OAM Module | Dual-slot |

| Suggested PSU | 1150 W | 550 W |

| Bus Interface | PCIe 5.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x16 |

| Display Outputs | No outputs | 4x DisplayPort 1.4a |

| DirectX | N/A | 12 Ultimate (12_2) |

| OpenGL | N/A | 4.6 |

| Vulkan | N/A | 1.4 |

| Dimensions | Not listed | 245 mm / 9.6 inches length, 112 mm / 4.4 inches height |

| Release Date | 2023-12-05 | 2023-08-08 |

| Production Status | Not listed | Active |

| Predecessor | Radeon Instinct | Workstation Ampere |

| Successor | None listed | Blackwell PRO W |