Radeon HD 5550 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 580, which comes with GPU core speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 580 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5550 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5550		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 249344 (1948%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 is quite a bit (more or less 1957%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5550. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 172208 (1957%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 580 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5550		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35824 (814%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 get to the max fill rate.