Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 380X		190 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 104 Watts (55%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 40% quicker than the Radeon R9 380X overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 380X		182400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (40%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 87%) more effective at AF than the Radeon R9 380X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 107840 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 199%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon R9 380X, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 380X		31040 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 61760 (199%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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