Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M280X, which comes with GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 896 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M280X		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (292%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should be much faster than the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 168000 (191%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 360%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 181600 (360%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 78400 (544%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel 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.