Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has core speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 5500 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37376 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is quite a bit (approximately 65%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58160 (65%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (81%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.