Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon VII

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon VII, which uses a 7 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1400 MHz. The HBM2 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 3840 SPUs along with 240 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon VII		295 Watts
	Difference: 107 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon VII should in theory be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon VII		1048576 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 894976 (583%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon VII should be quite a bit (approximately 394%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon VII		336000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 268000 (394%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon VII is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon VII		89600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 62400 (229%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.