GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		210 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 66%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		40992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27008 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 is a bit (approximately 8%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5870, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.