Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which comes with a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (about 161%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 143200 (161%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63200 (214%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.