Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which features a GPU core clock speed of 1670 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM running at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon RX 5500 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be much (approximately 41%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42464 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be much (approximately 79%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 280, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23584 (79%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture units by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.