Radeon HD 5870 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (67%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 241%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 164000 (241%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 241%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 65600 (241%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.