GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 970 uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1050 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1750 MHz on this particular model. It features 1664 SPUs along with 104 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.