Radeon HD 5570 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 251 Watts (584%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 789% quicker than the Radeon HD 5570 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5570		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 227200 (789%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 1685%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5570. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 219000 (1685%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (about 1685%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 5570, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 87600 (1685%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.