Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The Radeon HD 5870 has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which features GPU core speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation 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 Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer	ATi	ATi
Year	September 23, 2009	December 2010
Code Name	Cypress XT	Cayman XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	850 MHz	880 MHz
Shader Speed	N/A MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1200 MHz	1375 MHz
Unified Shaders	1600(320x5)	1536
Texture Mapping Units	80	96
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	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	153600 MB/sec	176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	68000 Mtexels/sec	84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	27200 Mpixels/sec	28160 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.