Radeon HD 4670 512MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4670 512MB		70 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (257%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 4670 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (450%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (approximately 252%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4670 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		24000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60480 (252%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4670 512MB		6000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22160 (369%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.