AMD Radeon RX 550X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Comparison

The database pits two end-of-life GPUs from opposite ends of the performance spectrum against each other: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, the flagship Pascal card of the GeForce 10 series, and AMD's Radeon RX 550X, a compact Polaris-derived part from the RX 500X generation. The recorded data shows this is not a close contest. Across the two shared head-to-head benchmarks, the GTX 1080 wins both, by margins of 169 percent and 430 percent. The RX 550X never takes a single category. What the comparison does offer is a clear illustration of how silicon scale, memory subsystems, and design priorities translate into benchmark outcomes, and why a card that draws 180 W behaves so differently from one that draws 50 W without any power connector at all.

Where Each One Wins

Strictly by the head-to-head results, the GTX 1080 wins everywhere. In Geekbench OpenCL it scores 51,204 against the RX 550X's 9,662, a 430 percent gap. In Geekbench Vulkan the margin is 169 percent, with the GTX 1080 posting 30,398 to the RX 550X's 11,299. There is no workload in the shared dataset where the RX 550X comes out ahead.

Where the RX 550X wins is in attributes rather than benchmarks. It draws 50 W against 180 W, needs no power connector, and carries a suggested PSU rating of 250 W versus 450 W for the GTX 1080. Its 145 mm board length is dramatically shorter than the GTX 1080's 267 mm. It also supports FP16 compute at full 1:1 rate, matching its FP32 throughput at 1,211.4 GFLOPS, whereas the GTX 1080 throttles FP16 to 1:64, landing at just 138.6 GFLOPS. For half-precision workloads, that is the one measurable technical category where the AMD card holds an advantage.

Both cards sit in the same neighborhood in the database's percentile rankings, at 51 and 49 percent versus all GPUs, but that apparent proximity is misleading: their average benchmark scores are 11,960 and 10,481, and their rival clusters barely overlap. The GTX 1080's nearest rivals include the Radeon RX 7800 XT and the GeForce GTX 1660, while the RX 550X keeps company with the Tesla C2075 and the Radeon R9 M275X.

Architecture Differences

The GTX 1080 is built on TSMC's 16 nm process, packing 7,200 million transistors onto a 314 mm² die (the GP104 chip) for a density of 22.9M per mm². The RX 550X uses GlobalFoundries' 14 nm node with the Lexa chip, carrying 2,200 million transistors on a 103 mm² die at 21.4M per mm². Densities are similar; the difference is simply how much silicon each card brings. The GTX 1080 has more than three times the transistor count and three times the die area.

Architecturally, the GTX 1080 is Pascal with 2560 shading units, 160 texture mapping units, and 64 render output units. The RX 550X runs GCN 4.0 with 512 shading units, 32 TMUs, and 16 ROPs. That is a fivefold advantage in shaders, fivefold in TMUs, and fourfold in ROPs for the NVIDIA card.

Memory tells the same story. The GTX 1080 pairs 8 GB of GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus with 320.3 GB/s of bandwidth, running at 1251 MHz (10 Gbps effective). The RX 550X has 4 GB of GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus with 96.00 GB/s of bandwidth at 1500 MHz (6 Gbps effective). The interface differs too: full PCIe 3.0 x16 for the GTX 1080 versus PCIe 3.0 x8 for the RX 550X.

Feature support diverges in places beyond FP16. The GTX 1080 covers DirectX 12 feature level 12_1 and Vulkan 1.4; the RX 550X stops at 12_0 and Vulkan 1.3. Both support OpenGL 4.6 and both carry DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, though the GTX 1080 offers three of them plus HDMI 2.0 and DVI, against a single DisplayPort, single HDMI 2.0b, and DVI on the AMD card. Neither GPU has RT cores or tensor cores. The GTX 1080 launched in 2016 as part of the GeForce 10 series, preceded by GeForce 900 and succeeded by GeForce 20. The RX 550X arrived in late 2018, preceded by Polaris and succeeded by Vega.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The OpenCL result is the starkest number on the page. The GTX 1080 scores 51,204 in Geekbench OpenCL; the RX 550X scores 9,662. That is a 430 percent gap, and it aligns almost perfectly with the raw compute disparity: 8.873 TFLOPS of FP32 against 1,211.4 GFLOPS. When a benchmark exercises the full shader array, the RX 550X simply does not have the resources to stay in frame.

Vulkan narrows the gap but does not close it. Here the GTX 1080 scores 30,398 and the RX 550X scores 11,299, a 169 percent advantage for NVIDIA. That the RX 550X gets comparatively closer in Vulkan than in OpenCL suggests the lower-level API extracts more from its 512 shaders, but the deficit remains overwhelming.

The GTX 1080's broader benchmark record reinforces the picture. It posts 23,824 in Geekbench Metal, 15,586 in PassMark G3D, 7,614 in PassMark GPU Compute, and 1,560 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12. Its PassMark DirectX results run from 55 (DX12) to 211 (DX9). Its average benchmark score of 11,960 places it 0.3 percent behind the GeForce GTX 960A, 1 percent ahead of the Radeon RX 6500 XT, 2.4 percent ahead of the GTX 1660, and 2.9 percent ahead of the RX 7800 XT in that cluster's recorded averages.

The RX 550X's average of 10,481 puts it within 0.8 percent of the Tesla C2075, 1 percent behind the Radeon R9 M275X, 1.2 percent ahead of the RX 6500M, and 1.4 percent behind the RX 6600S. Those are tight deltas, but they describe a cluster anchored firmly in entry-level territory, and the head-to-head numbers confirm the distance between it and a Pascal flagship.

FAQ

Q: Is the GTX 1080 or the RX 550X faster in benchmarks?

A: The GTX 1080 wins every shared test. It leads by 430 percent in Geekbench OpenCL (51,204 versus 9,662) and by 169 percent in Geekbench Vulkan (30,398 versus 11,299).

Q: Does either card support ray tracing hardware?

A: No. Neither GPU has RT cores or tensor cores. Both are end-of-life parts predating dedicated ray tracing hardware in their respective lineups.

Q: Which card needs less power?

A: The RX 550X, by a wide margin. Its TDP is 50 W and it requires no power connector, with a suggested PSU of 250 W. The GTX 1080 has a 180 W TDP, one 8-pin connector, and a suggested PSU of 450 W.

Q: Is the RX 550X better at anything in the data?

A: Yes, FP16 compute. It runs half-precision at a 1:1 rate with FP32, both at 1,211.4 GFLOPS. The GTX 1080's FP16 runs at 1:64, delivering only 138.6 GFLOPS.

Q: How do their memory configurations compare?

A: The GTX 1080 has 8 GB of GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus with 320.3 GB/s of bandwidth. The RX 550X has 4 GB of GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus with 96.00 GB/s of bandwidth.

Q: How does each card rank against all GPUs in the database?

A: The GTX 1080 sits in the 51st percentile with an average benchmark score of 11,960; the RX 550X sits in the 49th percentile with an average of 10,481.

Specification Differences

| Field | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | AMD Radeon RX 550X |

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

| Chip | GP104 | Lexa |

| Architecture | Pascal | GCN 4.0 |

| Generation | GeForce 10 | Polaris (RX 500X) |

| Process node | 16 nm (TSMC) | 14 nm (GlobalFoundries) |

| Transistors | 7,200 million | 2,200 million |

| Die size | 314 mm² | 103 mm² |

| Transistor density | 22.9M / mm² | 21.4M / mm² |

| Base clock | 1607 MHz | 1100 MHz |

| Boost clock | 1733 MHz | 1183 MHz |

| Memory clock | 1251 MHz (10 Gbps effective) | 1500 MHz (6 Gbps effective) |

| Memory size | 8 GB | 4 GB |

| Memory type | GDDR5X | GDDR5 |

| Bus width | 256 bit | 128 bit |

| Bandwidth | 320.3 GB/s | 96.00 GB/s |

| Shading units | 2560 | 512 |

| TMUs | 160 | 32 |

| ROPs | 64 | 16 |

| Pixel rate | 110.9 GPixel/s | 18.93 GPixel/s |

| Texture rate | 277.3 GTexel/s | 37.86 GTexel/s |

| FP32 | 8.873 TFLOPS | 1,211.4 GFLOPS |

| FP16 | 138.6 GFLOPS (1:64) | 1,211.4 GFLOPS (1:1) |

| TDP | 180 W | 50 W |

| Power connectors | 1x 8-pin | None |

| Suggested PSU | 450 W | 250 W |

| Bus interface | PCIe 3.0 x16 | PCIe 3.0 x8 |

| Display outputs | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI 2.0, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x DisplayPort 1.4a |

| DirectX | 12 (12_1) | 12 (12_0) |

| Vulkan | 1.4 | 1.3 |

| Length | 267 mm (10.5 inches) | 145 mm (5.7 inches) |

| Release date | 2016 | 2018 |

| Predecessor / successor | GeForce 900 / GeForce 20 | Polaris / Vega |

| Launch MSRP | 599 USD | not recorded |

The two cards match on slot width (both dual-slot), OpenGL 4.6 support, and end-of-life status. Everything else diverges, and the benchmark data shows how decisively those divergences play out.