Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which features a clock speed of 1090 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (292%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 280%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 170960 (280%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 432%) more effective at AA than the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75360 (432%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.