Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 M395X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M395X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 723 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M395X		125 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M395X will be 4% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M395X will be quite a bit (more or less 36%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 M395X		92544 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24544 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M395X		23136 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4064 (18%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.