AMD Radeon RX 480 vs Kuroutoshikou Radeon RX Vega56 (RD-VEGA 56-E8GB/H2D2)

The Radeon RX Vega56 graphics card has twice as many ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) than the Radeon RX 480 GPU. Furthermore, its graphics clock speed is insignificantly higher, therefore it is not surprising to see that it has significantly higher pixel fillrate. Better maximum pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, and is an indication of better card performance, unless the GPU is limited by something else, such as memory bandwidth or texture mapping.

Pixel fill rate was an important factor years ago, but not so much these days. Texture fill rate has more significance in modern games. This parameter is proportional to graphics clock and the number of TMUs. The Radeon RX Vega56 card has many more TMUs, which stands for Texture Mapping Units, and slightly higher graphics frequency, thus it has substantially higher texture fillrate. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can use more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Maximum Single Precision performance illustrates how fast the graphics card is at running programs, that utilize single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second. As a rule, the more CUDA cores or stream processors the GPU has, and the the faster they operate at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The Radeon RX Vega56 graphics unit has a significant lead here. Higher single-precision performance number means the card will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the Radeon RX Vega56 graphics card offers wider memory bus. As such, it has considerably higher memory bandwidth.