Radeon HD 5970: specs and benchmarks
Aggregate performance score
Radeon HD 5970 provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at 5.72% of a leader's which is GeForce RTX 5090.
Contents
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 1 GHz are supplied, and together with 256 Bit memory interface this creates a bandwidth of 128.0 GB/s.
Compatibility-wise, this is a dual-slot graphics 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.
Primary details
Some basic facts about Radeon HD 5970: architecture, market segment, release date etc.
| Place in the ranking | 629 | |
| Place by popularity | not in top-100 | |
| Cost-effectiveness evaluation | 0.26 | |
| Power efficiency | 1.38 | of 100.00 (Radeon 890M) |
| Architecture | TeraScale 2 (2009−2015) | |
| GPU code name | Hemlock | |
| Market segment | Desktop | |
| Release date | 18 November 2009 (15 years ago) | |
| Launch price (MSRP) | $699 | of 14,999 (Quadro Plex 7000) |
Cost-effectiveness evaluation
The higher the performance-to-price ratio, the better. We use the manufacturer's recommended prices for comparison.
Performance to price scatter graph
Detailed specifications
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 cores | 1600 ×2 | of 24064 (RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell) |
| Core clock speed | 725 MHz | of 2670 MHz (Arc B580) |
| Number of transistors | 2,154 million | of 153,000 million (Radeon Instinct MI300) |
| Manufacturing process technology | 40 nm | of 3 nm (GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop) |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 294 Watt | of 2400 Watt (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem) |
| Texture fill rate | 58.00 ×2 | of 2,554 (Radeon Instinct MI300X) |
| Floating-point processing power | 2.32 TFLOPS ×2 | of 126 (RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell) |
| ROPs | 32 ×2 | of 512 (Moore Threads MTT S4000) |
| TMUs | 80 ×2 | of 1280 (Data Center GPU Max NEXT) |
Form factor & 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).
| Interface | PCIe 2.0 x16 | |
| Length | 305 mm | |
| Width | 2-slot | |
| Supplementary power connectors | 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin |
VRAM capacity and type
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 type | GDDR5 | |
| Maximum RAM amount | 1 GB ×2 | of 288 GB (Radeon Instinct MI325X) |
| Memory bus width | 256 Bit ×2 | of 8192 Bit (Radeon Instinct MI250X) |
| Memory clock speed | 1000 MHz | of 20000 (RTX 5000 Ada Generation Mobile) |
| Memory bandwidth | 128.0 GB/s ×2 | of 5,171 GB/s (Radeon Instinct MI300X) |
Connectivity and outputs
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 Connectors | 2x DVI, 1x mini-DisplayPort |
API and SDK compatibility
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 RTX 5090) |
| OpenCL | 1.2 | |
| Vulkan | N/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 score.
Passmark
This is the most ubiquitous GPU benchmark. 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.
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.
Send your test results of Radeon HD 5970.
NVIDIA equivalent
According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to Radeon HD 5970 is GeForce GTX 460, which is nearly equal in speed and lower by 1 position in our ranking.
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.
Recommended processors
These processors are most commonly used with Radeon HD 5970 according to our statistics.
