Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 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 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 15% faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be quite a bit (about 24%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (about 81%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 most pixels that the graphics card can 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 the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.