Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which features core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 189 Watts (310%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 5670 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (175%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (more or less 445%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68980 (445%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21960 (354%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.