Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which has GPU clock speed of 1090 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 129% quicker than the Radeon RX 460 2GB overall, due to its greater data rate. (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 much (more or less 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

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, by far. (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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.