Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M390X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M390X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M390X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon R9 M390X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 151%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M390X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M390X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139456 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen 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 M390X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69664 (301%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.