Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 1000 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5670		61 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (187%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7870 should be 140% faster than the Radeon HD 5670 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5670		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (more or less 416%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		15500 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64500 (416%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be much (more or less 416%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 5670, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5670		6200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25800 (416%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 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 better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.