Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500, which has 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 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 15% quicker than the Radeon RX 5500 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 34624 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is much (about 24%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28560 (24%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be much (approximately 81%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.