Radeon HD 5970 vs Radeon HD 6770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6770, which features GPU core speed of 900 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1050 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 800 Stream Processors, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6770		108 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (172%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6770 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6770		67200 MB/sec
	Difference: 188800 (281%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 544%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6770. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		36000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 196000 (544%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 544%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6770, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6770		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 78400 (544%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.