Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 240, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 730 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific card. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 264 Watts (880%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 789% quicker than the Radeon R7 240 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 240		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 227200 (789%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 1489%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 240. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 217400 (1489%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 1489%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 240, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 86960 (1489%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a 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 fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.