Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 460

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 460, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 460		75 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (292%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 129% quicker than the Radeon RX 460 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon RX 460		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 280%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 460		61040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 170960 (280%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 432%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 460, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75360 (432%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.