GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which makes use of a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500 should in theory perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (about 35%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37760 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (26%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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