Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon RX 470 4GB should be a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 35200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a lot (about 40%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34048 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (5%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.