GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which features a core clock speed of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 5500 XT should be 2% faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is just a bit (more or less 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6968 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17120 (31%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few 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.