Radeon RX 550: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The Radeon RX 550 is AMD's entry-level dedicated GPU from 2017 — a genuine (if modest) Polaris-family part rather than a rebadged OEM filler, built to give budget desktops and laptops a step up from integrated graphics. This guide covers its 41 benchmarked games at 1080p on high (with 44 medium-preset measurements) and the 6 catalog listings name-matched to it.

Where the Radeon RX 550 sits in 2026

A catalog score of 24.1 puts the RX 550 at 189th of 341 — the lower middle of the table. Its neighborhood is a generational sandwich: Apple's M3 Pro (24.7), the RX 550X (24.3) and the GeForce GTX 960M (24.2) just above; the Radeon Vega 11 (24.1), GeForce MX330 (24) and MX250 (23.7) just below. That's the honest summary of what the RX 550 became: a card that modern integrated graphics caught up to, sitting level with chips that cost nothing extra to include.

What the chip brings

The RX 550 uses the Lexa variant of AMD's GCN 4.0 architecture on the 14nm process: 512 shader cores, 4GB of GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus with 112GB/s of bandwidth, and peak throughput of 1.21 teraflops. That memory subsystem is its one genuine strength — real GDDR5 bandwidth that entry DDR3-based parts of the era simply didn't have. PassMark rates it at 2695, and it carries full DirectX, OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support.

FPS in games at 1080p

At the high preset the RX 550 handles its era's mainstream well: DOTA 2 Reborn at 45 fps, Batman: Arkham Knight at 39, Monster Hunter Stories 2 at 32 (35 on medium), X-Plane at 29, Metro Exodus at 24 (28 on medium) and Civilization 6 at 24. Modern releases expose the ceiling quickly: The Witcher 3 at 17, Diablo 4 at 17 (20 on medium), Counter-Strike 2 at 14 (27 on medium), Far Cry 5 at 15, Elden Ring at 9 and Cyberpunk 2077 at 4. The dual-preset data consistently shows that dropping to medium buys 20–50 percent more frames — the classic budget-card compromise.

Laptops that carry it

The 6 name-matched listings split into two very different groups, and it's worth being straight about both. The genuine matches are business machines: Lenovo's ThinkPad E480 (2017, $256) and E490 (2018, $243), where the RX 550 served as the optional step-up GPU. The other four — Alienware m15 R3 ($750) and m17 R3 ($1027), MSI Bravo 15 ($590) and HP Victus 16 ($590) — are gaming machines whose listings name-match to this record but whose actual configurations carry far stronger graphics. That's why the roster medians read high (a best-GPU score of 71.5): they describe those machines' real GPU options, not the RX 550. Judge each listing on its actual spec sheet.

Bottom line

As a chip, the RX 550 is a fair 1080p-medium card for games of the mid-2010s and a competent display driver for multi-monitor setups. In a ThinkPad E-series listing at the right price it's harmless. But it should never be the reason you buy a machine in 2026 — current integrated graphics match it for free, and the gaming-branded listings it name-matches to are better than this record suggests. Use this page to calibrate what the chip itself can do, then check the laptop's actual configuration.