Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 580, which has a core clock speed of 1257 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 14 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon RX 580 should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 28%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50992 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 131%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon RX 580, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 52576 (131%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.