Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 290, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs 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 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 290, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 81%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104000 (81%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 81%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 290, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 290		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.