Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M270X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1125 MHz on this particular model. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 184000 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 700%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 203000 (700%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 81200 (700%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.