Radeon HD 7970 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which has a core clock speed of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 34624 (15%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (about 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32696 (28%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25344 (86%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.