Radeon RX 480 4GB vs Radeon RX Vega 56

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX Vega 56, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1156 MHz. The HBM2 RAM runs at a speed of 1600 MHz on this model. It features 3584 SPUs as well as 224 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon RX Vega 56		210 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX Vega 56 should perform much faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB in general. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		419430 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 190054 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 will be a lot (about 61%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		258944 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 97664 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX Vega 56 is quite a bit (more or less 106%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX Vega 56		73984 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38144 (106%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.