Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1717 MHz. The GDDR6 memory works at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 164 Watts (126%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a bit superior to the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 26624 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 54%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 5500 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80904 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37856 (69%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.