Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 926 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1650 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 470 4GB should be 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		211200 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 35200 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB should be much (about 40%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		118528 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34048 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is a better choice, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon RX 470 4GB		29632 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1472 (5%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics 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 number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.