Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which features core clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1625 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R7 260X in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a small bit (approximately 10%) better at AF 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 a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, by a large margin. (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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.