Radeon HD 4790 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which features a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 550 should in theory be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 4790 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4790		102400 MB/sec
	Difference: 12288 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 will be quite a bit (more or less 83%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4790. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		19200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 550 is superior to the Radeon HD 4790, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4790		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (83%)

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

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.