Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 926 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 470 4GB will be 1550% faster than the Radeon HD 5550 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 198400 (1550%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB should be quite a bit (approximately 1247%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 109728 (1247%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25232 (573%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.