Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 590, which makes use of a 12 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1469 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this card. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (68%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 590 should theoretically be a little bit better than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6144 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be just a bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon RX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20464 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 97%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 590, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 45792 (97%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.