Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition, which has a core clock speed of 1680 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 7 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		235 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 59 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition will be 79% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		458752 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 202752 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition is a bit (approximately 16%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		268800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition is a better choice, but only just. (explain)

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition		107520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14720 (16%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.