Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon R7 370 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 370 4G, which features a GPU core clock speed of 975 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1400 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 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 4G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 370 4G should in theory be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 35%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon R7 370 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22080 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R7 370 4G is superior to the Radeon HD 6970, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		31200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3040 (11%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.