Radeon HD 6990 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has core clock speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 90624 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a small bit (more or less 8%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 5500. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12400 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.