ATI Radeon HD 5970: specs and benchmarks

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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. 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4 GHz are supplied, and together with 256 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 128.0 GB/s.

Compatibility-wise, this is dual-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 8.51 percent of a leader's which is AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.

General info

Of Radeon HD 5970's architecture, market type and release date.

Place in our rating

414

Value for money (0-100)

4.62

Architecture

TeraScale 2

GPU code name

Hemlock

Market segment

Desktop

Launch date

18 November 2009 (11 years ago)

Launch price (MSRP)

$699

Price now

$69 (0.1x MSRP)

of 9999 (Radeon Pro Vega II)

Technical specs

Radeon HD 5970's general performance parameters such as number of shaders, GPU base 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.

Pipelines / CUDA cores

1600

of 10752 (GA102)

Core clock speed

725 MHz

of 2233 (Playstation 5 GPU)

Number of transistors

2,154 million

of 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Mobile)

Manufacturing process technology

40 nm

of 5 (Apple M1 GPU)

Thermal design power (TDP)

294 Watt

of 900 (Tesla S2050)

Texture fill rate

58.00

of 781.8 (Radeon Pro W6900X)

Floating-point performance

2x 2,320.0 gflops

of 2918.4 (GRID K340)

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

Maximum RAM amount

1 GB

of 80 (A100 SXM4 80 GB)

Memory bus width

256 Bit

of 6144 (GRID A100A)

Memory clock speed

4000 MHz

of 19500 (GeForce RTX 3090)

Memory bandwidth

128.0 GB/s

of 1024 (Radeon VII)

Video outputs and ports

Types and number of video connectors present on Radeon HD 5970. As a rule, this section is relevant only for desktop reference video cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model.

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)

Shader Model

5.0

OpenGL

4.4

of 4.6 (GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile)

OpenCL

1.2

Vulkan

N/A

Benchmark performance

Non-gaming benchmark performance of Radeon HD 5970. Note that overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range.

Overall score

This is our combined benchmark performance rating. We are regularly improving our combining algorithms, but if you find some perceived inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

8.51

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics

Fire Strike is a DirectX 11 benchmark for gaming PCs. It features two separate tests displaying a fight between a humanoid and a fiery creature seemingly made of lava. Using 1920x1080 resolution, Fire Strike shows off some realistic enough graphics and is quite taxing on hardware.

3690

Passmark

This is probably the most ubiquitous benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 (the last being done in 4K resolution if possible), and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities.

2219

Game benchmarks

Let's see how good Radeon HD 5970 is for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in frames per second. Comparisons with game system requirements are included, but remember that sometimes official requirements may reflect reality inaccurately.

This video card matches 82% minimum and 69% recommended requirements of all games known to us.

Minimum

82%