Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 270, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much better than the Radeon R9 270 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 222%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 160000 (222%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 222%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon R9 270, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64000 (222%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.