Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon RX 470

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 470, which features core speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 470 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 is a lot (about 74%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50528 (74%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 470		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2432 (9%)

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

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