Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7770, which features GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 214 Watts (268%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7770 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 184000 (256%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 480%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7770. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 192000 (480%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 480%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7770, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 76800 (480%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.