Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5500, which comes with core clock speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 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 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 40% faster than the Radeon RX 5500 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a bit (approximately 8%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 5500. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12400 (8%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be just a bit (more or less 1%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6990, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.