Radeon HD 5570 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870, which comes with core speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 132 Watts (307%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7870 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (433%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (approximately 515%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67000 (515%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26800 (515%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.