Radeon HD 5770 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 will be 129% faster than the Radeon HD 5770 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (approximately 148%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5770. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50480 (148%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 107%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5770, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14560 (107%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 higher this number, the better the video 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 card can possibly write to its 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.