Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a clock speed of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R9 M395X should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X should be quite a bit (approximately 36%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24544 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4064 (18%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.