Radeon HD 4770 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 108 Watts (135%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (200%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 should be much (approximately 183%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (183%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be quite a bit (approximately 127%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4770, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (127%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.