GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500, which has core speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500 should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be a small bit (approximately 2%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2832 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be a lot (about 35%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 5500, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18624 (35%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.