Radeon HD 4770 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare 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 along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4770		80 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 170 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4770		51200 MB/sec
	Difference: 124800 (244%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (approximately 252%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 4770. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60480 (252%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 135%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4770, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4770		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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.