Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM works at a frequency of 14000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon R9 280 should theoretically perform a small 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 will be much (approximately 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 should be quite a bit (more or less 79%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.