Radeon HD 5970: specs and benchmarks

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Aggregate performance score

Radeon HD 5970 provides poor gaming and benchmark performance at 5.92% of a leader's which is GeForce RTX 4090.

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 ranking589
Place by popularitynot in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation0.36
Power efficiency1.38of 100.00 (Radeon 890M)
ArchitectureTeraScale 2 (2009−2015)
GPU code nameHemlock
Market segmentDesktop
Release date18 November 2009 (15 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)$699 of 14,999 (Quadro Plex 7000)

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

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 cores1600of 21760 (GeForce RTX 5090)
Core clock speed725 MHzof 2670 MHz (Arc B580)
Number of transistors2,154 millionof 208,000 million (B200 SXM 192 GB)
Manufacturing process technology40 nmof 3 nm (Arc Graphics 140V)
Power consumption (TDP)294 Wattof 2400 Watt (Data Center GPU Max Subsystem)
Texture fill rate58.00of 2,554 (Radeon Instinct MI300X)
Floating-point processing power2.32 TFLOPSof 109.7 (GeForce RTX 5090)
ROPs32of 192 (Radeon RX 7900 XTX)
TMUs80of 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).

InterfacePCIe 2.0 x16
Length305 mm
Width2-slot
Supplementary power connectors1x 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 typeGDDR5
Maximum RAM amount1 GBof 294912 (Radeon Instinct MI325X)
Memory bus width256 Bitof 8192 Bit (Radeon Instinct MI250X)
Memory clock speed1000 MHzof 20000 (RTX 5000 Ada Generation Mobile)
Memory bandwidth128.0 GB/sof 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 Connectors2x DVI, 1x mini-DisplayPort

API compatibility

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

DirectX11.2 (11_0)
Shader Model5.0
OpenGL4.4of 4.6 (GeForce RTX 4090)
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 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.

ATI HD 5970 5.92

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.

ATI HD 5970 2282

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.

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.

Closest competitors

Radeon HD 5970's performance relative to its closest rivals among desktop graphics cards.


Radeon HD 5970 100

NVIDIA equivalent

According to our data, the closest NVIDIA alternative to Radeon HD 5970 is GeForce GTX 460, which is slower by 1% and lower by 6 positions 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.

All comparisons with Radeon HD 5970

Community ratings

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


3.6 43 votes

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Questions & comments

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