Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1750 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be just a bit faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 26624 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 44%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70720 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 159%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56960 (159%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.