Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with GPU core speed of 723 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M395X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 151%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M395X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139456 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.