Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1469 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (68%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 590 should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is just a bit (approximately 10%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20464 (10%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon RX 590, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45792 (97%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.