Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 HD 6990		5820 points
Radeon RX 550		3507 points
	Difference: 2313 (66%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 325 Watts (650%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon RX 550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 205312 (179%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (about 353%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 124160 (353%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (approximately 202%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 550, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35520 (202%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.