Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 5670

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5670, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 289 Watts (474%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be 260% faster than the Radeon HD 5670 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 166400 (260%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 should be much (about 287%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44500 (287%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is superior to the Radeon HD 5670, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17800 (287%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number 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 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 can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.