Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7870 XT		185 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 7870 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 161%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 7870 XT. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		88800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 143200 (161%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 214%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7870 XT, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7870 XT		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63200 (214%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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