Radeon HD 5570 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 207 Watts (481%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 235200 (817%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (more or less 811%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 105400 (811%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (more or less 469%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5570, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (469%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.