Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 370 2G

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R7 370 2G, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 975 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1400 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 2G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R7 370 2G is 17% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a little bit (about 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 370 2G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 2G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 370 2G is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (15%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed in one second. This figure 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.