Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with a clock speed of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280, in theory, should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT will be a lot (about 45%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46600 (45%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 XT is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25088 (84%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.