Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 550, which features GPU clock speed of 1100 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 512 SPUs, 32 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 12% faster than the Radeon RX 550 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 13312 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is quite a bit (about 48%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17000 (48%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (32%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.