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 a desktop graphics card based on a TeraScale 2 architecture and made with 40 nm manufacturing process. It is primarily aimed at gamer market. 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 5.94% of a leader's which is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

RTX 4090GeForce RTX4090
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General info

Some basic facts about Radeon HD 5970: architecture, market segment, release date etc.

Place in performance ranking550
Place by popularitynot in top-100
Value for money0.82
ArchitectureTeraScale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code nameHemlock
Market segmentDesktop
Release date18 November 2009 (14 years old)
Launch price (MSRP)$699
Current price$69 (0.1x MSRP)of 168889 (A100 PCIe 80 GB)
Value for money

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

Technical specs

Radeon HD 5970's specs 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 cores1600of 20480 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT)
Core clock speed725 MHzof 2610 (Radeon RX 6500 XT)
Number of transistors2,154 millionof 14400 (GeForce GTX 1080 SLI Mobile)
Manufacturing process technology40 nmof 4 (GeForce RTX 4080)
Power consumption (TDP)294 Wattof 2400 (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem)
Texture fill rate58.00of 969.9 (H100 SXM5 96 GB)
Floating-point performance2x 2,320.0 gflopsof 16384 (Radeon Pro Duo)

Size and compatibility

This section provides details about the physical dimensions of Radeon HD 5970 and its compatibility with other computer components. This information is useful when selecting a computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards, it includes details about the interface and bus (for motherboard compatibility) and additional power connectors (for power supply compatibility).

InterfacePCIe 2.0 x16
Length305 mm
Width2-slot
Supplementary power connectors1x 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 have no dedicated memory and use a shared part of system RAM instead.

Memory typeGDDR5
Maximum RAM amount1 GBof 192 (Radeon Instinct MI300X)
Memory bus width256 Bitof 19000 (GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB)
Memory clock speed4000 MHzof 23000 (GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER)
Memory bandwidth128.0 GB/sof 3276 (Aldebaran)

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 graphics cards, since for notebook ones the availability of certain video outputs depends on the laptop model, while non-reference desktop models can (though not necessarily will) bear a different set of video ports.

Display Connectors2x DVI, 1x mini-DisplayPort

API support

APIs supported by Radeon HD 5970, sometimes including their particular versions.

DirectX11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model5.0
OpenGL4.4of 4.6 (GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile)
OpenCL1.2
VulkanN/A

Benchmark performance

Synthetic benchmark performance of Radeon HD 5970. The combined score is measured on a 0-100 point scale.


Combined synthetic benchmark score

This is our combined benchmark performance score. 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.

Passmark

This is the most ubiquitous GPU benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various types of 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.

Benchmark coverage: 25%

ATI HD 5970 2301

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 made of lava. Using 1920x1080 resolution, Fire Strike shows off some realistic graphics and is quite taxing on hardware.

Benchmark coverage: 14%

ATI HD 5970 3690

Gaming performance

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.

Relative perfomance

Radeon HD 5970's performance compared to nearest competitors among desktop video cards.


NVIDIA equivalent

According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to Radeon HD 5970 is P106-090, which is faster by 2% and higher by 4 positions in our ranking.

P106-090P106090
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Here are some closest NVIDIA rivals to Radeon HD 5970:

Similar GPUs

Here is our recommendation of several graphics cards that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.

GTX 460GeForce GTX460
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ATI HD 5870Radeon HD5870
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GTX 650 TiGeForce GTX650 Ti
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FireStream 9370FireStream9370
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HD 6850 X2Radeon HD6850 X2
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Recommended processors

These processors are most commonly used with Radeon HD 5970 according to our statistics.

User ratings: view and submit

Here you can see the user rating of the graphics card, as well as rate it yourself.


3.5 41 vote

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Questions and comments

Here you can ask a question about Radeon HD 5970, agree or disagree with our judgements, or report an error or mismatch.