Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5600

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 XT features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5600, which features core clock speeds of 1375 MHz on the GPU, and 12000 MHz on the 6144 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.