Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB should be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 512 (0%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 should be a lot (about 33%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 512MB		26400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (50%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported 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 the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.