Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 244 Watts (488%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon RX 550 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 141312 (123%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 559%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 196800 (559%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon RX 550, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75200 (427%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.