Radeon R9 290 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 40% quicker than the Radeon RX 5500 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be a small bit (about 15%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18960 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is superior to the Radeon R9 290, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2240 (4%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.