GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 Stream Processors, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 174 Watts (145%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (approximately 222%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 159872 (222%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 56736 (157%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.