Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M270X, which has a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 256% quicker than the Radeon R9 M270X in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 700%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 700%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M270X, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure 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 card will be at handling 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.