Radeon HD 4870 512MB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which features core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4870 512MB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 673%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 202000 (673%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 673%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 512MB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80800 (673%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.