Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 370 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 370 2G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 975 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this model. It features 1024 SPUs as well as 64 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 2G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 370 2G should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be just a bit (approximately 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R7 370 2G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 2G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 370 2G is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 2G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (15%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.