Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 470, which has GPU clock speed of 926 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 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		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 470 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 should be a lot (about 74%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50528 (74%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 is just a bit (approximately 9%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2432 (9%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.