Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 280

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 280, which features a core clock speed of 933 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 280		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon R9 280 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 280		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 122%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 280		104496 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 127504 (122%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon R9 280, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 280		29856 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 62944 (211%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has 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 faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number 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 card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.