Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

The Radeon HD 7970 makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 memory runs at a speed of 14000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated 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 video card will be at 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 can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.