Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which features clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon RX 470 4GB is 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 35200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is quite a bit (about 40%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34048 (40%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a small bit (about 5%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (5%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.