Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 127 Watts (208%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 140% quicker than the Radeon HD 5670 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (more or less 339%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52500 (339%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is superior to the Radeon HD 5670, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21000 (339%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.