Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 380 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 380 4G, which has core speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon R9 380 4G		190 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 380 4G should theoretically be just a bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		182400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G will be a lot (about 60%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		108640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40640 (60%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 4G should be a bit (approximately 14%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5870, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 4G		31040 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3840 (14%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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