Radeon HD 7870 XT vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with a core clock speed of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be a lot (approximately 70%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62296 (70%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25344 (86%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.