Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1280 Stream Processors, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 43% quicker than the Radeon R9 270 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 270		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 222%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 270. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 160000 (222%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64000 (222%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.