Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 5700

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 5700, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1465 MHz, and 8096 MB of GDDR6 RAM set to run at 1750 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5700		180 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5700 should be 79% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700		458752 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 202752 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a bit (about 10%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 5700. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5700		210960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21040 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 is a little bit (about 1%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700		93760 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 960 (1%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.