Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which has a core clock frequency of 1257 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised 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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 580 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 28%) better at 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 is quite a bit (more or less 131%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 580, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.