GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which features a core clock frequency of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 5500 should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a little bit (about 2%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2832 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is quite a bit (approximately 35%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 5500, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18624 (35%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.