GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which has core speeds of 1717 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 67 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500 XT, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 101376 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (approximately 97%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74296 (97%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution 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
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 35744 (186%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.