Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (90%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (approximately 360%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 181600 (360%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 64000 (222%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.