Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which comes with a core clock speed of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 34624 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be much (about 24%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28560 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.