GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 5500

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500, which comes with a clock frequency of 1670 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 7 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 5500		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 5500, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 should be quite a bit (more or less 35%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500		146960 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37760 (35%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be quite a bit (about 26%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon RX 5500, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500		53440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (26%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.