ATI Radeon HD 5970 vs FirePro D300

Place in the ranking	454	600
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	no data	0.34
Power efficiency	4.60	1.38
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)	TeraScale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code name	Pitcairn	Hemlock
Market segment	Workstation	Desktop
Release date	18 January 2014 (11 years ago)	18 November 2009 (15 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	no data	$699

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

The higher the performance-to-price ratio, the better. We use the manufacturer's recommended prices for comparison.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1280	1600
Core clock speed	850 MHz	725 MHz
Number of transistors	2,800 million	2,154 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	150 Watt	294 Watt
Texture fill rate	68.00	58.00
Floating-point processing power	2.176 TFLOPS	2.32 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	32
TMUs	80	80

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Length	242 mm	305 mm
Width	1-slot	2-slot
Supplementary power connectors	no data	1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB	1 GB
Memory bus width	256 Bit	256 Bit
Memory clock speed	1270 MHz	1000 MHz
Memory bandwidth	162.6 GB/s	128.0 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

4x DisplayPort

2x DVI, 1x mini-DisplayPort

API and SDK compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	12 (11_1)	11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model	5.1	5.0
OpenGL	4.6	4.4
OpenCL	1.2	1.2
Vulkan	1.2.131	N/A

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	9.37	5.49
Recency	18 January 2014	18 November 2009
Maximum RAM amount	2 GB	1 GB
Chip lithography	28 nm	40 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	150 Watt	294 Watt

FirePro D300 has a 70.7% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 4 years, a 100% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 42.9% more advanced lithography process, and 96% lower power consumption.

The FirePro D300 is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon HD 5970 in performance tests.

Be aware that FirePro D300 is a workstation graphics card while Radeon HD 5970 is a desktop one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.