Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which has a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270 should theoretically be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 should be a little bit (about 6%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 is a little bit (more or less 6%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.