Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

The Radeon R9 280 uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 933 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has core speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 14000 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.