Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which features a clock frequency of 1090 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 113 Watts (151%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5870 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 460 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a little bit (more or less 11%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6960 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9760 (56%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could 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 Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.