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Radeon HD 6790 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

The Radeon HD 6790 makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific model. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 550, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 512 SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon RX 550		3507 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 1357 (63%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6790 should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 19712 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 will be a small bit (about 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 550 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4160 (31%)

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 6790

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Radeon RX 550

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Radeon HD 6790	Radeon RX 550
Manufacturer	AMD	AMD
Year	April 2011	April 2017
Code Name	Barts LE	Polaris 12
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	840 MHz	1100 MHz
Memory Speed	4200 MHz	7000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	50 watts
Bandwidth	134400 MB/sec	114688 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33600 Mtexels/sec	35200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	13440 Mpixels/sec	17600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	800	512
Texture Mapping Units	40	32
Render Output Units	16	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	128-bit
Fab Process	40 nm	14 nm
Transistors	1700 million	2200 million
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB 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 the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of 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 speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

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