Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 470, which features GPU clock speed of 926 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 174 Watts (145%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon RX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
	Difference: 44800 (21%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 96%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113472 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63168 (213%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.