Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 780		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Geforce GTX 780 should be 13% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32384 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 40%) better at AF than the Geforce GTX 780. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66304 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 51376 (124%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number 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 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 are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.