Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 280, which features clock speeds of 933 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon R9 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 122%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 127504 (122%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 211%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 280, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 62944 (211%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.