Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which makes use of a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 memory is set to run at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 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 HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 5500 should perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 37376 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (approximately 65%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58160 (65%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (about 81%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (81%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.