GeForce RTX 4090 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which features core clock speeds of 1717 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
GeForce RTX 4090		450 Watts
	Difference: 320 Watts (246%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce RTX 4090 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1042432 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 813056 (354%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 4090 will be a lot (approximately 657%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon RX 5500 XT. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		1144320 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 993224 (657%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 4090 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce RTX 4090		393360 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 338416 (616%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.