Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 295X2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 295X2, which has core clock speeds of 1018 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2816 SPUs as well as 176 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon R9 295X2		500 Watts
	Difference: 206 Watts (70%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 295X2 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		640000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 384000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 should be quite a bit (approximately 54%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		358336 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 126336 (54%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 295X2 is quite a bit (about 40%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 295X2		130304 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37504 (40%)

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 past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.