GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. 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 650		64 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 230 Watts (359%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 650 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 176000 (220%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 585%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 198144 (585%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 650, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 75872 (448%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.