Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (40%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 will be 31% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 54400 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (about 41%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24480 (41%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is just a bit (about 17%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4160 (17%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. 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 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 applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.