Radeon HD 4870 2GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running 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 4870 2GB		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 140800 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 673%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		30000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 202000 (673%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 673%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 4870 2GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4870 2GB		12000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80800 (673%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed in one second. This number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.