Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 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 4870 2GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (53%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (about 182%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54480 (182%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (more or less 135%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16160 (135%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.