Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1670 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 280 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is much (more or less 41%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42464 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (approximately 79%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 280, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23584 (79%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.