Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380X, which features a clock speed of 970 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1425 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 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 380X		190 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon R9 380X in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 87%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 380X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107840 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 199%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon R9 380X, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.