Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 167 Watts (131%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 524%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 194800 (524%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 68000 (274%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.