Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M395X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 723 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 169 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the Radeon R9 M395X overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 151%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon R9 M395X. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139456 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon R9 M395X, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69664 (301%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.