Radeon RX 550 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a clock speed of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 will be 129% quicker than the Radeon RX 550 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 147456 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is a lot (more or less 501%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 176336 (501%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 is quite a bit (about 167%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon RX 550, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29408 (167%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.