Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M390X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 151%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M390X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139456 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M390X, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69664 (301%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the 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 speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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.