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Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

The Radeon HD 7870 XT makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1717 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory running at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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 should in theory perform a little 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 will 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 will be quite a bit (more or less 86%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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

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Radeon HD 7870 XT

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Radeon RX 5500 XT

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Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 7870 XT	Radeon RX 5500 XT
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	November 2012	December 2019
Code Name	Tahiti LE	Navi 14 XTX
Memory	2048 MB	8192 MB
Core Speed	925 MHz	1717 MHz
Memory Speed	6000 MHz	3500 GB/s
Power (Max TDP)	185 watts	130 watts
Bandwidth	192000 MB/sec	229376 MB/sec
Texel Rate	88800 Mtexels/sec	151096 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29600 Mpixels/sec	54944 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	1536	1408
Texture Mapping Units	96	88
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR6
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	7 nm
Transistors	4313 million	6400 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 ×16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 12
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.3	OpenGL 4.6

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

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