Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon R9 280X		250 Watts
	Difference: 62 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 280X will be 88% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		288000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (88%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is quite a bit (about 60%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 280X		108800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40800 (60%)

Pixel Rate

Both cards have exactly the same pixel fill rate, so theoretically they should be equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same resolutions. (explain)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card 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 Render Output Units by the the core 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.