Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon RX 470 4GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 470 4GB, which comes with clock speeds of 926 MHz on the GPU, and 1650 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a lot (more or less 40%) more effective at 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 a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon RX 470 4GB is a better choice, though not by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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