Radeon RX 550 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

The Radeon RX 550 comes with a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 512 SPUs, 32 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 580, which has GPU clock speed of 1257 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.