Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 241%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 164000 (241%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 241%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 65600 (241%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.