Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon R7 370 4G

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R7 370 4G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 975 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1400 MHz on this specific model. It features 1024 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 4G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 184 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon R7 370 4G overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		179200 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 272%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 370 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 169600 (272%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		31200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 61600 (197%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.