Radeon HD 4870 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with 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 1GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 60800 (53%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 182%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54480 (182%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (approximately 135%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 1GB		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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.