Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 290X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2816 Stream Processors, 176 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon R9 290X		300 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 290X should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 290X		320000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 65%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		140800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 91200 (65%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 81%) more effective at AA than the Radeon R9 290X, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290X		51200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (81%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.