GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500, which features GPU core speed of 1670 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 5500 is 2% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be much (about 35%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37760 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (26%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.