Radeon HD 7870 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 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 5500 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 7870 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 75776 (49%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be much (about 84%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66960 (84%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is quite a bit (approximately 67%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 7870, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21440 (67%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.