AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Comparison

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The recorded data for the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 contains two direct comparisons, both in synthetic compute workloads. The results are decisive in favor of the NVIDIA card, with the AMD professional part trailing by a significant margin in each test.

In the Geekbench OpenCL benchmark, the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT scores 41,772 points, while the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 achieves 154,858 points. This represents a 73% deficit for the AMD card relative to its rival. The magnitude of this gap is substantial; the RTX 4070 delivers nearly four times the compute throughput in this particular OpenCL workload. Such a disparity is not a marginal difference but rather a fundamental separation in raw processing capability.

The Vulkan benchmark tells a similar story. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT records 39,601 points, whereas the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 reaches 174,152 points. Here the delta is even larger, at 77.3% in favor of the NVIDIA card. The RTX 4070 outperforms the AMD part by a factor of roughly 4.4 in this test. It is notable that the AMD card's Vulkan score is slightly lower than its OpenCL result, while the NVIDIA card shows the opposite trend, with its Vulkan score exceeding its OpenCL score. This suggests that the Ada Lovelace architecture extracts relatively more performance from the Vulkan API compared to OpenCL, or that driver optimizations favor the newer API on that platform.

Across the two head-to-head tests, the win count stands at zero for the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT and two for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070. The data offers no counter-example where the AMD card closes the gap or takes a lead. Both tests are compute-oriented, which typically stresses raw shader throughput, memory bandwidth, and driver efficiency. The results indicate that the RTX 4070 dominates in these dimensions.

Context from the broader database is useful here. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT holds an average benchmark score of 45,384 across all recorded tests, placing it at the 84th percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals include the Intel Arc A730M (average score 45,592, delta of -0.5%), the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile (average score 45,152, delta of 0.5%), and the NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada Generation (average score 45,972, delta of -1.3%). This places the AMD card in a tightly clustered performance tier where the differences between adjacent GPUs are within roughly 1.5%. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT is essentially at parity with these competing products when averaging all benchmark results, which suggests that its individual compute scores, while strong for its class, do not stand out dramatically against its direct contemporaries.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, by contrast, has an average benchmark score of 37,648, which places it at the 81st percentile of all GPUs. Its nearest rivals include the NVIDIA Tesla P4 (average score 37,628, delta of 0.1%), the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (average score 37,507, delta of 0.4%), and the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 (average score 37,157, delta of 1.3%). Interestingly, the RTX 4070's average score is lower than the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT's average score, yet its head-to-head OpenCL and Vulkan results are vastly superior. This apparent contradiction is explained by the composition of the benchmark suites. The RTX 4070's average includes a wider range of tests, including older DirectX and PassMark workloads, which may dilute its overall average relative to the AMD card, whose benchmark set is limited to three Geekbench tests. The head-to-head data, however, is unambiguous: in the shared tests, the NVIDIA card is overwhelmingly faster.

The Verdict

The benchmark data supports a clear conclusion for most use cases. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is the superior performer in every direct comparison recorded. Its OpenCL score is 73% higher, and its Vulkan score is 77.3% higher than the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT. For any workload that relies on these APIs, the RTX 4070 is the rational choice.

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT, however, is not without its own positioning. Its average benchmark score of 45,384 exceeds that of the RTX 4070 (37,648), and it sits at the 84th percentile versus the RTX 4070's 81st percentile. A user comparing only average scores might conclude the AMD card is the better product. The database, however, shows that this average is driven by the limited test set for the AMD card, which consists solely of Geekbench Metal, OpenCL, and Vulkan results. The RTX 4070 has a much broader test history, including PassMark and 3DMark entries, which pulls its average down even though its peak compute scores are far higher.

For professional compute tasks in OpenCL or Vulkan, the RTX 4070 is the definitive winner. For users who prioritize the specific Geekbench Metal score, the AMD card offers a recorded 54,779 points, a figure the NVIDIA card cannot contest because it has no Metal benchmark in this database. That single result, however, is the only area where the AMD card has a potential edge, and it is not a head-to-head comparison.

The production status of both cards is listed as end-of-life, so neither is a future-proof investment. The AMD card is an integrated graphics solution with no display outputs, while the RTX 4070 is a dual-slot discrete card with multiple display connections. This difference alone dictates the practical use case: the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT is designed for systems where the GPU is embedded and outputs are handled elsewhere, whereas the RTX 4070 is a standalone add-in card.

Where Each One Wins

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT wins in the domain of integrated graphics. It is an IGP with no power connectors and a 125 W TDP, making it suitable for compact or specialized systems where a discrete GPU cannot be installed. Its 8 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus provides 224.0 GB/s of bandwidth, which is sufficient for moderate compute loads. Its transistor density of 40.5 million per square millimeter on a 7 nm TSMC process is modest compared to the NVIDIA card, but the smaller die size of 158 mm² means lower manufacturing complexity for that specific chip.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 wins in every measurable performance category. It has 5,888 shading units versus the AMD card's 1,536, a 3.8x advantage. Its texture rate of 455.4 GTexel/s dwarfs the AMD card's 168.7 GTexel/s. Pixel rate is similarly lopsided: 158.4 GPixel/s versus 56.22 GPixel/s. The RTX 4070 also brings dedicated hardware that the AMD card lacks entirely: 46 ray tracing cores and 184 tensor cores. These features enable workloads in ray-traced rendering and AI acceleration that are simply not possible on the AMD part.

Memory capacity favors the NVIDIA card as well. The RTX 4070 has 12 GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus, delivering 504.2 GB/s of bandwidth, more than double the AMD card's 224.0 GB/s. This bandwidth advantage is critical in compute workloads that stream large datasets. The RTX 4070 also supports PCIe 4.0 x16, while the AMD card is limited to x8, halving the available host interface bandwidth.

For connectivity, the RTX 4070 offers 1x HDMI 2.1 and 3x DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT offers no outputs. Any user needing to drive a display from the GPU itself must choose the NVIDIA card. The AMD card is restricted to headless compute or rendering tasks where the display is driven by a separate adapter.

FAQ

Q: Which GPU has the higher average benchmark score?

A: The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT has a higher average benchmark score of 45,384 compared to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070's 37,648. The AMD card also holds a higher percentile rank at 84 versus 81.

Q: How large is the performance gap in the OpenCL benchmark?

A: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 scores 154,858 in Geekbench OpenCL, which is 73% higher than the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT's score of 41,772.

Q: Does the AMD card have any ray tracing or tensor core hardware?

A: No. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT lists no RT cores and no tensor cores. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 has 46 RT cores and 184 tensor cores.

Q: What is the memory configuration of each card?

A: The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT has 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus with 224.0 GB/s bandwidth. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 has 12 GB of GDDR6X on a 192-bit bus with 504.2 GB/s bandwidth.

Q: Can the AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT be used to connect a monitor?

A: No. The AMD card has no display outputs. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 includes 1x HDMI 2.1 and 3x DisplayPort 1.4a outputs.

Q: What is the power requirement difference?

A: The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT has a 125 W TDP and requires no external power connectors, with a suggested PSU of 300 W. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 has a 200 W TDP and uses a single 16-pin connector, with a suggested PSU of 550 W.

Architecture Differences

The two GPUs represent fundamentally different design philosophies and manufacturing generations. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT is built on the RDNA 1.0 architecture using the Navi 14 chip, fabricated on a 7 nm TSMC process. It contains 6,400 million transistors on a die size of 158 mm², yielding a transistor density of 40.5 million per square millimeter. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 uses the Ada Lovelace architecture with the AD104 chip, produced on a 5 nm TSMC process. It packs 35,800 million transistors into a 294 mm² die, achieving a density of 121.8 million per square millimeter. The NVIDIA chip has more than five times the transistor count of the AMD chip, despite a die that is less than twice as large.

The compute resources differ by an order of magnitude. The NVIDIA card has 5,888 shading units, 184 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The AMD card has 1,536 shading units, 96 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. This translates directly into the measured performance gaps: the RTX 4070's FP32 throughput is 29.15 TFLOPS, while the AMD card manages 5.398 TFLOPS. The NVIDIA card achieves 29.15 TFLOPS for FP16 as well, indicating a 1:1 ratio, whereas the AMD card reaches 10.80 TFLOPS for FP16 via a 2:1 ratio. This means the NVIDIA card can process FP16 data at its full FP32 rate, a significant advantage for machine learning inference and certain scientific workloads.

Clock speeds also favor the NVIDIA card. The RTX 4070 has a base clock of 1920 MHz and a boost clock of 2475 MHz. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT runs at 1187 MHz base and 1757 MHz boost. The NVIDIA card sustains higher frequencies despite its larger die, a signal of the efficiency of the 5 nm process and Ada Lovelace design.

Ray tracing and AI acceleration are exclusive to the NVIDIA card. The 46 RT cores and 184 tensor cores enable hardware-accelerated ray tracing and tensor operations, features entirely absent from the AMD part. The API support reflects this: the NVIDIA card supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), while the AMD card is limited to DirectX 12 (12_1). Both cards support OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4.

The memory subsystem is another point of divergence. The AMD card uses GDDR6 with a 128-bit interface and 224.0 GB/s bandwidth. The NVIDIA card uses GDDR6X with a 192-bit interface and 504.2 GB/s bandwidth. The NVIDIA memory clock is listed at 1313 MHz with 21 Gbps effective transfer, while the AMD memory runs at 1750 MHz with 14 Gbps effective. The bus interface also differs: the AMD card uses PCIe 4.0 x8, halving the lane count versus the NVIDIA card's PCIe 4.0 x16.

Physical and power characteristics are starkly different. The AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT is an integrated graphics processor with no slot width, no power connectors, and no display outputs. Its TDP is 125 W with a suggested 300 W PSU. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 is a dual-slot card measuring 240 mm in length, 110 mm in height, and 40 mm in width. It requires a single 16-pin power connector and a 550 W PSU. The AMD card was released on August 3, 2020, while the NVIDIA card launched on April 11, 2023. The NVIDIA card's predecessor is the GeForce 30 series, and its successor is the GeForce 50 series. The AMD card has no listed predecessor or successor. The RTX 4070 has a launch MSRP of 599 USD.