Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. 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 HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5770 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
	Difference: 187200 (244%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 248%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84400 (248%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (118%)

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 transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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