Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which has a core clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1425 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 380 2G overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 114%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 380 2G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 123360 (114%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 199%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 380 2G, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 61760 (199%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.