Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which features GPU clock speed of 1670 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM running at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290X should in theory perform much faster than the Radeon RX 5500 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be a small bit (more or less 4%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6160 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a small bit (about 4%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2240 (4%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.