Compare any two graphics cards:
Radeon HD 5670 vs Radeon HD 7770
IntroThe Radeon HD 5670 uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.
Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7770, which comes with GPU core speed of 1000 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1125 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 640 Stream Processors, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.
Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks
Power Consumption (Max TDP)
In theory, the Radeon HD 7770 is 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 5670 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)
Texel RateThe Radeon HD 7770 should be a lot (about 158%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 5670. (explain)
Pixel RateIf using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7770 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)
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.
Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.
Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.
Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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 maximum fill rate.