Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 1120 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 is 12% quicker than the Radeon RX 480 4GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 26624 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 44%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70720 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 159%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56960 (159%)

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 across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.