ATI Radeon HD 6870 vs MSI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 (R5870 Eyefinity 6)

There are two factors that influence the maximum pixel fillrate. These are graphics clock speed and the number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). The ATI Radeon HD 6870 has an edge in this area, as it operates at higher frequency, and both cards have identical number of ROPs. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased card performance, unless the GPU is limited by something else, such as texture mapping or available memory bandwidth.

Even so its graphics frequency is lower, the MSI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card comes with more TMUs, which results in higher texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or use more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance shows how good the graphics card is at running applications, that utilize single-precision floating point numbers. The performance is measured in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. Since FP calculations are performed by shaders, CUDA cores or stream processors, the performance is directly proportional to their number. It also depends on the processor clock rate. The MSI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Memory bandwidth parameter tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics unit can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. GPUs with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, the MSI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 has higher clocked memory. As a consequence, it has more memory bandwidth.