Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 370 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 370 4G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 975 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this particular card. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 4G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R7 370 4G will be 17% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is just a bit (about 9%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 370 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 370 4G is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (15%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.