Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280X, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1500 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 280X should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 280X is a lot (more or less 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 in theory they should be equally good at at anti-aliasing, and be able to handle the same screen 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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.