GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory 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 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 112 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 144112 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 529%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 195136 (529%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 260, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 76672 (475%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should 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 higher screen 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 of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.