Radeon HD 7870 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500, which makes use of a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1670 MHz. The GDDR6 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this model. 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		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5500 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7870 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 75776 (49%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is a lot (more or less 84%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66960 (84%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21440 (67%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.