Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which comes with clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 is 40% quicker than the Radeon R9 380 4G in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 114%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon R9 380 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 123360 (114%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 61760 (199%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.