Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 143 Watts (95%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 344%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 179800 (344%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 300%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69600 (300%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.