In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 5970 Crossfire.

The R9 280X has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5970, but the HD 5970 has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 280X. As a result, the HD 5970 exhibits a 14.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R9 280X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R9 280X has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5970, but the HD 5970 has 64 more Render Output Units than the R9 280X. As a result, the HD 5970 exhibits a 38.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R9 280X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 280X was released over three years more recently than the HD 5970, and so the R9 280X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5970 when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The R9 280X has 2048 MB more video memory than the HD 5970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 280X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 64 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5970, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is much better than the HD 5970.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5970 Crossfire has 6400. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5970 is 3016. The R9 280X having 1080 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 280X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5970.

The R9 280X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5970. This means that the R9 280X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5970.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5970 Crossfire requires 588 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X and a PSU with at least 850 Watts for the HD 5970. The HD 5970 requires 38 Watts more than the R9 280X to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5970 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R9 280X.