GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with core speeds of 1717 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR6 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (27%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 5500 XT should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 980 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is just a bit (approximately 5%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6968 (5%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17120 (31%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.