Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R7 250

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 250, which has a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1150 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 250		65 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 229 Watts (352%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 250 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 250		73600 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (248%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 867%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 250. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 250		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 208000 (867%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 250		8000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 84800 (1060%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.