GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses 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 particular card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 149 Watts (103%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (more or less 112%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122800 (112%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 38%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 970, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (38%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.