Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare all of 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 memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500 XT, in theory, should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37376 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be quite a bit (about 70%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62296 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (about 86%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25344 (86%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.