ATI Radeon HD 5970: specs and benchmarks

Summary
ATI started Radeon HD 5970 sales 18 November 2009 at a recommended price of $699. This is TeraScale 2 architecture desktop card based on 40 nm manufacturing process and primarily aimed at gamers. 2x 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4 GHz are supplied, and together with 2x 256 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 2x 128.0 GB / s.
Compatibility-wise, this is 2-slot card attached via PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Its manufacturer default version has a length of 305 mm. One 6-pin and one 8-pin connectors are required, and power consumption is at 294 Watt.
It provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at 12.15 percent of a leader's which is NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000.
General info
Of Radeon HD 5970's architecture, market type and release date.
Architecture
TeraScale 2
Code name
Hemlock
Type
Desktop
Release date
18 November 2009
Technical specs
Radeon HD 5970's general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core clock, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. These parameters indirectly speak of Radeon HD 5970's performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider its benchmark and gaming test results.
Transistor count
2,154 million
of 21100
Compatibility, dimensions and requirements
Information on Radeon HD 5970's compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop video cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).
Interface
PCIe 2.0 x16
Length
305 mm
Supplementary power connectors
1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin
Memory
Parameters of memory installed on Radeon HD 5970: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Note that GPUs integrated into processors don't have dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM.
Memory type
GDDR5
Memory clock speed
4000 MHz
of 14000
Video outputs and ports
Types and number of video connectors present on Radeon HD 5970.
Display Connectors
2x DVI, 1x mini-DisplayPort
API support
APIs supported by Radeon HD 5970, sometimes including their particular versions.
DirectX
11.2 (11_0)
OpenGL
4.4
of 4.6
Benchmark performance
Non-gaming benchmarks performance of Radeon HD 5970. Note that overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range.
Overall benchmark performance
12.15
Passmark
2595
3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score
3690
Game benchmarks
Let's see how good Radeon HD 5970 is for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS. Comparisons with system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect real performance inaccurately.
Relative perfomance
Overall Radeon HD 5970 performance compared to its nearest competitors. All GPU types participate.
NVIDIA equivalent
We believe that the nearest equivalent to Radeon HD 5970 from NVIDIA is GeForce GTX 780 Rev. 2, which is slower by 1% and lower by 1 position in our rating.