Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 295X2, which has GPU core speed of 1018 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 512-bit bus. It also is made up of 2816 SPUs, 176 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 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 206 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 295X2 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 384000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 will be quite a bit (about 54%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 126336 (54%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 295X2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37504 (40%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.