Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R7 370 4G

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 370 4G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 975 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed 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 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 370 4G is 2% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 35%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 370 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22080 (35%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon R7 370 4G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3040 (11%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.