GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs 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 particular card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 75 Watts (34%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 275 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 128992 (102%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 358%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 181360 (358%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (about 424%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 275, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75076 (424%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.