Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 12 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should theoretically be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 86400 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be a lot (approximately 32%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21600 (32%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (6%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.