Radeon RX 5500 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The Radeon RX 5500 features a clock speed of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 14000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.