Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500, which has clock speeds of 1670 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280 should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon RX 5500 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 is much (more or less 41%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42464 (41%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23584 (79%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.