GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has a clock frequency of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be much (approximately 35%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon RX 5500, 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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.