Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M270X, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1125 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon R9 M270X in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 184000 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 700%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 203000 (700%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M270X, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 81200 (700%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.