Radeon R9 270 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1717 MHz. The GDDR6 RAM runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (15%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 5500 XT should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 270 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 50176 (28%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be a lot (approximately 110%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 79096 (110%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is a lot (approximately 91%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 270, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26144 (91%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.