Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Radeon HD 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	September 23, 2009	October 2010
Code Name	Cypress XT	Barts XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	850 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)	1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1600(320x5)	1120
Texture Mapping Units	80	56
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.2	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	188 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	68000 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27200 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.