Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with a core clock speed of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 73 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 49600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a small bit (more or less 10%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9600 (55%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.