Radeon HD 4890 1GB vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 TAUs 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 4890 1GB		190 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (280%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4890 1GB is 9% quicker than the Radeon RX 550 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		124800 MB/sec
Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
	Difference: 10112 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4890 1GB is a bit (more or less 14%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

Radeon HD 4890 1GB		40000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 550 should be a little bit (about 10%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4890 1GB		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (10%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.