Radeon R9 280 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which comes with a clock speed of 1717 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
	Difference: 120 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 280 should in theory perform a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 10624 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT should be much (approximately 45%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46600 (45%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is much (approximately 84%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25088 (84%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.