Radeon RX 550 vs Radeon RX 6500 XT

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which comes with a core clock frequency of 2200 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 2250 MHz. It also uses a 64-bit bus, and makes use of a 6 nm design. It is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon RX 6500 XT		107 Watts
	Difference: 57 Watts (114%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 6500 XT should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 550 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		147456 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 32768 (29%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is much (approximately 300%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		140800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 105600 (300%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 6500 XT will be a lot (more or less 300%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 550, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon RX 6500 XT		70400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (300%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.