Radeon HD 4870 X2 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
Radeon HD 4870 X2		350 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 11% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		230400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 287%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		60000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 172000 (287%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 287%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 X2		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 68800 (287%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.