Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 896 Stream Processors, 56 Texture Address Units, 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 191% quicker than the Radeon R9 M280X in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 360%) more effective at 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.