Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 460, which features core clock speeds of 1090 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (292%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the Radeon RX 460 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 280%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 170960 (280%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 432%) more effective at AA than the Radeon RX 460, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75360 (432%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.