Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 7870 XT

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, which has a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, 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

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much faster 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 is much (more or less 161%) better at 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

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7870 XT, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.