Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which has a core clock speed of 926 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1650 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 174 Watts (145%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon RX 470 4GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 96%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 470 4GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113472 (96%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (about 213%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 470 4GB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63168 (213%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.