Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 has a GPU clock speed of 1000 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which comes with 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 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.