Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6770 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770 1GB, which has a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 800 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6770 1GB		108 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (172%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 281% faster than the Radeon HD 6770 1GB overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770 1GB		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 188800 (281%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 544%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6770 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770 1GB		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 196000 (544%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6770 1GB		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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.