Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 550, which comes with a clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 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

The Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically perform just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 550 overall. (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 texture 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 using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.