Radeon R9 290X vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which has a clock frequency of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290X should be much faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 will be just a bit (about 4%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6160 (4%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.