Radeon HD 7970 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 works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 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 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 34624 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be quite a bit (about 28%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32696 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be a lot (approximately 86%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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