Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1750 MHz on this specific card. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 480 4GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 26624 (12%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 44%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 480 4GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70720 (44%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 159%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.