In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 5670 Diamond 1GB GDDR5.

The HD 7870 has a 235 MHz higher core clock speed and 60 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5670. This results in the HD 7870 providing 65.3 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7870 has a 235 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the HD 5670. This results in the HD 7870 providing 26.1 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7870 was released over a year more recently than the HD 5670, and so the HD 7870 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 5670.

The HD 7870 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5670, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 7870 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7870 has 90.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5670, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is massively better than the HD 5670.

The Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5670 Diamond 1GB GDDR5 has 400. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5670 is 155. The HD 7870 having 944 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7870 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5670.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5670. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5670.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5670, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7870.