Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 480, which comes with GPU core speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 2304 Stream Processors, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 480, in theory, should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 44%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon RX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70720 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 159%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56960 (159%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated 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 better the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.