Radeon HD 5570 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 157 Watts (365%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5570 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (more or less 442%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57400 (442%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (392%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.