AMD Radeon Pro W5700X vs NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile Comparison

The AMD Radeon Pro W5700X and the NVIDIA RTX A500 Mobile occupy very different corners of the professional GPU market, yet the recorded data places them closer on paper than their form factors suggest. One is a quad-slot workstation card built for Apple's MPX platform; the other is a 30 W integrated-class mobile chip. Both are now end-of-life parts, but the benchmark database shows a clear and consistent pattern whenever the two are measured on the same tests.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

Only two tests in the database cover both GPUs, and the AMD card wins both of them.

The Geekbench OpenCL result is the narrower contest. The Radeon Pro W5700X scores 43810 against 37873 for the RTX A500 Mobile, a gap of roughly six percent. That margin is small enough that day-to-day OpenCL workloads would likely feel similar between the two, yet it is consistent and repeatable in the recorded data.

Geekbench Vulkan is where the comparison opens up. Here the W5700X scores 45246 while the A500 Mobile manages 37873, a lead of nearly twenty percent for the AMD card. Vulkan figures are interesting here because the A500 Mobile's Vulkan score actually sits below its own OpenCL score, whereas the W5700X gains going from OpenCL to Vulkan. Whether that reflects driver maturity, API overhead, or the way each architecture dispatches compute work is not answerable from the numbers alone, but the database suggests the AMD part extracts more from lower-overhead graphics APIs.

A third data point exists only for the W5700X: a Geekbench Metal score of 75427. Metal matters for this card specifically because it lives inside the Apple MPX ecosystem, and that score dwarfs every cross-platform number either GPU posts. It is a reminder that the W5700X was tuned for a specific platform first.

Contextualizing against the wider database, the W5700X's average benchmark score of 54828 places it in the 87th percentile of all recorded GPUs, while the A500 Mobile's average of 39568 lands at the 82nd percentile. The gap in percentile terms is modest, five points, but the underlying averages differ by a substantial margin. The W5700X's rivals include the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (average score 54247) and RTX 4080 SUPER (54209), both of which it outperforms by just over one percent, plus the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE 12 GB (55698) and Radeon 8060S (55757), which sit about two percent ahead of it. In other words, the workstation card trades blows with modern high-end gaming silicon in these compute benchmarks. The A500 Mobile, by contrast, clusters around older professional parts: the Radeon Pro 575 (39555), 575X (39116), WX 7100 (40063), and Pro 580 (40318), all within two percent of its average. That is respectable company for a mobile chip, but it is a different performance tier entirely.

FAQ

Q: Which GPU is faster overall?

A: The Radeon Pro W5700X. It wins both shared benchmarks, OpenCL by about six percent and Vulkan by nearly twenty percent, and its average score of 54828 exceeds the A500 Mobile's 39568 by a wide margin.

Q: Does either card support ray tracing?

A: Only the RTX A500 Mobile. It carries 16 RT cores and 64 tensor cores, features the W5700X lacks entirely under RDNA 1.0. The W5700X also supports DirectX 12 (12_1), whereas the A500 Mobile supports DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2), the higher feature level associated with hardware ray tracing support.

Q: How big is the memory difference?

A: Significant. The W5700X has 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus delivering 448 GB/s of bandwidth. The A500 Mobile has 4 GB of GDDR6 on a 64-bit bus at 96 GB/s. That is four times the capacity and well over four times the bandwidth for the AMD card.

Q: Which one uses less power?

A: The A500 Mobile, dramatically. Its TDP is 30 W with no power connectors required, while the W5700X is rated at 205 W and the database suggests a 550 W system power supply. One fits a thin laptop; the other needs a full workstation chassis.

Q: Are these GPUs still in production?

A: No. Both are listed as end-of-life. The W5700X launched in December 2019; the A500 Mobile arrived in March 2022.

Q: Which has higher raw compute throughput?

A: The W5700X, with 10.44 TFLOPS of FP32 versus 6.296 TFLOPS for the A500 Mobile. In half-precision workloads the gap widens further: the AMD card reaches 20.89 TFLOPS FP16 at a 2:1 rate, while the A500 Mobile matches its FP16 throughput to FP16 at 1:1, meaning no half-precision advantage.

Where Each One Wins

The W5700X wins wherever memory capacity, bandwidth, and sustained compute matter. Its 448 GB/s of bandwidth and 16 GB frame buffer make it the only one of the two suited to large datasets, high-resolution texture work, or compute jobs that cannot fit in 4 GB. Its higher texture rate (326.4 GTexel/s versus 98.37 GTexel/s) and pixel rate (130.6 GPixel/s versus 49.18 GPixel/s) also point to heavier rendering and simulation workloads. The OpenCL and Vulkan wins reinforce this: for GPU compute in professional applications, the database consistently favors the AMD card.

The A500 Mobile wins on capability features and efficiency, not raw scores. It is the only one of the pair with hardware ray tracing and tensor cores, which opens doors to accelerated inference work and modern rendering features that the W5700X simply cannot access. Its 30 W envelope means it can live in a portable device, something the quad-slot, 305 mm long W5700X obviously cannot. For a mobile professional who needs certified drivers and some AI acceleration on the go, the recorded data suggests the A500 Mobile fills a niche the W5700X was never designed to touch.

Specification Differences

The two cards diverge on nearly every measurable dimension. The W5700X runs at a 1243 MHz base and 2040 MHz boost clock, versus 832 MHz base and 1537 MHz boost for the A500 Mobile. Memory differs in every respect: 16 GB versus 4 GB, 256-bit versus 64-bit bus, 14 Gbps effective versus 12 Gbps effective memory speed, and 448 GB/s versus 96 GB/s bandwidth.

The shader complement differs too, 2560 shading units with 160 texture units and 64 ROPs on the AMD side against 2048 units, 64 TMUs, and 32 ROPs on the NVIDIA side. FP16 behavior is a notable split: 20.89 TFLOPS at a 2:1 ratio for the W5700X versus 6.296 TFLOPS at 1:1 for the A500 Mobile.

Physically and electrically they are opposites. The W5700X is a quad-slot card, 305 mm long, rated at 205 W, with a suggested 550 W power supply and a launch MSRP of 999 USD. The A500 Mobile is an integrated-class part with no power connectors, a 30 W TDP, and dimensions that depend on the host device. Their bus interfaces differ fundamentally: Apple MPX for one, PCIe 4.0 x8 for the other. Display outputs follow the same split, with 1x HDMI 2.0b and 4x Thunderbolt on the W5700X against portable-device-dependent outputs on the A500 Mobile. DirectX support also differs: 12 (12_1) versus 12 Ultimate (12_2).

Architecture Differences

The W5700X is built on the Navi 10 chip using RDNA 1.0, fabricated at TSMC on a 7 nm process. Its die measures 251 mm² and packs 10,300 million transistors, a density of 41.0 million transistors per square millimeter. RDNA 1.0 notably predates hardware ray tracing at AMD, which is why the card has no RT or tensor cores.

The A500 Mobile uses the GA107S chip on NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, produced at Samsung on an 8 nm node. Its die is smaller at 200 mm² with 8,700 million transistors, but slightly denser at 43.5 million per square millimeter. Ampere brings 16 RT cores and 64 tensor cores to this mobile variant, plus its lineage is traceable in the database: the predecessor is listed as Quadro Turing-M and the successor as Ada-MW.

The generational framing is curious. The W5700X belongs to the Radeon Pro Mac Navi series and launched in 2019; the A500 Mobile arrived in 2022 on the newer architecture, the newer design generation, and yet posts lower compute scores across the board. That is the classic workstation-mobile-versus-desktop-workstation tradeoff, and the numbers bear it out without ambiguity.

The Verdict

The data points one direction for performance. If the decision hinges on compute throughput, memory capacity, memory bandwidth, or benchmark scores in OpenCL and Vulkan, the Radeon Pro W5700X is the stronger GPU by every shared measurement, winning both head-to-head tests and sitting in the 87th percentile versus the A500 Mobile's 82nd. Its 16 GB frame buffer and 448 GB/s of bandwidth make it the only realistic choice of the two for memory-heavy professional work.

The A500 Mobile earns its place on different grounds. It delivers its performance inside a 30 W envelope, offers hardware ray tracing and tensor cores the W5700X lacks, supports the higher DirectX 12 Ultimate feature level, and fits into portable devices. A generation newer despite scoring lower, it suits mobile professionals who need modern feature support and efficiency more than outright speed. Choose the W5700X for a fixed workstation where performance dominates; choose the A500 Mobile where mobility, power draw, and AI feature support carry more weight than any benchmark number in the database.