Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770, which features GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1050 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 800 SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (172%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 is 281% quicker than the Radeon HD 6770 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 188800 (281%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 544%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6770. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 196000 (544%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 544%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6770, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 78400 (544%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.