Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which has GPU clock speed of 1717 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up 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 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 is 15% quicker than the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (more or less 28%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32696 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 XT is superior to the Radeon HD 7970, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.