Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R9 380X

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 380X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1425 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 380X		190 Watts
	Difference: 2 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 380X should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X is much (approximately 83%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		124160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56160 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380X is just a bit (approximately 14%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 5870, and also capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 380X		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.