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Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The Radeon HD 5850 features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850 151 Watts
Radeon HD 6970 250 Watts
Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850 128000 MB/sec
Difference: 48000 (38%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 62%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 52200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 32280 (62%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970 28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850 23200 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 4960 (21%)

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

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model Radeon HD 5850 Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer AMD AMD
Year September 30, 2009 December 2010
Code Name Cypress PRO Cayman XT
Memory 1024 MB 2048 MB
Core Speed 725 MHz 880 MHz
Memory Speed 4000 MHz 5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 151 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 128000 MB/sec 176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 52200 Mtexels/sec 84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23200 Mpixels/sec 28160 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1440(288x5) 1536
Texture Mapping Units 72 96
Render Output Units 32 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 2154 million 2640 million
Bus PCIe 2.1 x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 3.2 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one 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 calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Comments

One Response to “Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6970”
Upgrade path from single 5850? - Hardware Canucks says:

[...] still can run any game well. bench here to look at single card 5850 vs 6970 then 5850CF vs 6970 Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 6970 – Performance Comparison Benchmarks @ Hardware Compare AnandTech - Bench - GPU11 __________________ Firefly: EVGA P55 Classified [...]

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