Radeon R9 280X vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which has core speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units 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 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 280X should be a lot faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 58624 (26%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (about 35%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 280X. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38160 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is superior to the Radeon R9 280X, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280X		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26240 (96%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of 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.