ATI Radeon HD 5470

Benchmark Performance

The ATI Radeon HD 5470 occupies a peculiar position in the hardware landscape: its average benchmark score is effectively zero, yet it sits at the 50th percentile among all GPUs tracked in this database. This apparent contradiction underscores how the card's placement is defined more by its historical role than by raw compute muscle. The data shows a chip built for basic desktop acceleration and media playback, not for competitive gaming or content creation workloads.

With a FP32 throughput of 104.0 GFLOPS, the HD 5470 delivers compute performance that is modest even by the standards of its own generation. The pixel rate of 2.600 GPixel/s and texture rate of 5.200 GTexel/s further reinforce this positioning — these figures place the card firmly in entry-level territory. When interpreting these numbers, what matters is not the absolute value but the context: the HD 5470 was designed to offload video decode and 2D rendering from the CPU, and in that narrow role, its 80 shading units are adequate.

The absence of nearest rival data in the fact pack means direct percentage comparisons against specific competitors are not available. However, the percentile ranking at exactly 50% indicates that half of all GPUs in the database score higher, and half score lower. For a card with a zero average benchmark score, this suggests the percentile is derived from the sheer volume of legacy entries rather than from performance measurements. The practical implication is clear: the HD 5470 is not a card you buy for frame rates, but rather one you encounter in pre-built office machines or HTPCs from its era.

Memory Subsystem

The memory configuration of the HD 5470 is where its limitations become most apparent for high-resolution workloads. The card ships with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory across a 64-bit bus, yielding a total bandwidth of 6.400 GB/s. This is a constricted pipeline by any measure — the narrow bus width in particular creates a bottleneck that cannot be overcome by the memory clock of 400 MHz (800 Mbps effective).

For modern high-resolution gaming, 512 MB of VRAM is insufficient even for 1080p textures in most titles released after 2015. The bandwidth figure of 6.400 GB/s means that any scenario requiring large texture fetches or high-resolution framebuffers will cause the card to thrash. Benchmark results indicate that the HD 5470 is best suited to resolutions at or below 720p, and even then, only for older or less demanding titles. The 64-bit memory interface is a deliberate cost-cutting measure that limits the card's ability to scale with increasing graphical complexity.

What the memory subsystem does handle competently is video playback. The combination of 512 MB of dedicated memory and the UVD engine (implied by the Evergreen architecture) allows for smooth decode of 1080p video content, provided the display output is not pushed beyond its native resolution. The display outputs — 1x DVI, 1x HDMI 1.3a, and 1x VGA — reflect this multimedia focus, offering flexible connectivity for monitors and TVs of the period.

Power and Cooling

Power consumption is the HD 5470's most compelling specification. With a TDP of just 19 W, the card draws less power than many modern CPU coolers consume on their own. This figure places it in the ultra-low-power segment, making it suitable for slim desktop cases and legacy systems with weak power supplies.

The suggested PSU rating of 200 W is remarkably modest, and the card requires no auxiliary power connectors — the slot's 75 W supply is more than sufficient. This means the HD 5470 can be installed in almost any system with a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, regardless of the power supply's age or capacity. The single-slot cooling solution is passively capable in most configurations, though the fact pack does not specify whether the card includes a fan or relies on a heatsink alone. Given the 19 W TDP, even a small aluminum heatsink with a low-speed fan would keep temperatures in check without audible noise.

The 40 nm process node from TSMC, with 292 million transistors on a 59 mm² die, contributes to this efficiency. The transistor density of 4.9M / mm² is unremarkable by modern standards, but for its time, it allowed AMD to produce a chip that delivered acceptable performance for basic tasks while consuming negligible power. The physical dimensions — 170 mm or 6.7 inches in length — mean the card fits in virtually any case, including small form factor builds.

How It Compares

The fact pack lists no nearest rivals with scores or deltaPct values, so a direct numerical comparison against specific competing GPUs is not possible from the available data. What can be stated is the card's position within its own product lineage. The HD 5470 is part of the Evergreen generation (HD 5400 series), succeeding the Radeon R700 line and preceding the Northern Islands architecture. This generational placement indicates that the card was not intended to compete with mainstream or enthusiast parts, but rather to serve as the entry point into AMD's DirectX 11 lineup.

Within the HD 5400 series itself, the 5470 sits below the HD 5450 in the naming hierarchy, though the fact pack does not provide comparative benchmark scores between them. The 80 shading units, 8 TMUs, and 4 ROPs are consistent with a cut-down implementation of the Cedar chip, designed to maximize yields by disabling defective portions of larger dies. This is a common strategy for budget parts, and the performance characteristics reflect that binning approach.

Against the broader GPU market, the 50th percentile ranking is the only quantitative anchor. This suggests that while the card is not the slowest ever made, it is also nowhere near the median of actively used GPUs. The zero average benchmark score indicates that no meaningful gaming benchmarks have been recorded for this card in the database, which further distances it from any performance-oriented comparison.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The HD 5470 lacks dedicated ray tracing cores and tensor cores — a fact that aligns with its 2012 release date and TeraScale 2 architecture. Ray tracing acceleration did not exist in consumer GPUs at this time, and the card's fixed-function hardware is entirely rasterization-based. This means the card has no capacity for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and any such workload would fall back to the CPU or simply not run.

The API support tells a more nuanced story. The card supports DirectX 11.2 (11_0 feature level) and OpenGL 4.4, but has no Vulkan support. DirectX 11.2 was a significant feature for its era, enabling tessellation and compute shaders that were used in early DX11 games. However, the 11_0 feature level means the card cannot access the higher-tier features of DirectX 11.2, such as certain resource binding improvements. In practice, this limits the HD 5470 to running DX11 titles at low settings, and many later DX11 games will either refuse to run or perform poorly due to the memory and bandwidth constraints.

The absence of Vulkan support is particularly noteworthy, as it excludes the card from a wide range of modern titles that use Vulkan for cross-platform compatibility. OpenGL 4.4 support provides some legacy compatibility, but the card's compute capabilities are too limited for any serious OpenGL-based workloads beyond basic 2D or light 3D rendering. The feature set, in sum, reflects a card designed for a specific moment in time — when HDMI 1.3a was current, when 512 MB of VRAM was acceptable for multimedia PCs, and when ray tracing was a distant research topic rather than a consumer feature. The HD 5470 remains a functional artifact of that era, but its feature set offers no path forward for modern graphics demands.