Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 550, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 512 SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 4870 2GB should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 512 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 will be a small bit (about 17%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5200 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 should be a lot (about 47%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (47%)

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 moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.