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 along with 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 5500 should in theory be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be a bit (about 2%) better at AF 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 will be a lot (about 35%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 5500, and capable of handling higher 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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.