Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has a core clock speed of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 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

In theory, the Radeon RX 5500 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be a lot (about 84%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.