Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon R7 370 4G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 370 4G, which comes with a clock frequency of 975 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 370 4G		110 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 78 Watts (71%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon R7 370 4G should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 5870 in general. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		179200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a small bit (about 9%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R7 370 4G. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 370 4G		62400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5600 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 370 4G will be a little bit (more or less 15%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R7 370 4G		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.