Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which features a GPU core clock speed of 926 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also 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 RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 174 Watts (145%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 21% faster than the Radeon RX 470 4GB overall, due to its higher data rate. (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%) better at AF 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 213%) better at FSAA than the Radeon RX 470 4GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range 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 by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its 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 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.