GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 126%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 129520 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 70840 (323%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.