GeForce GTX Titan Black vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5870, which comes with GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX Titan Black		250 Watts
	Difference: 62 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX Titan Black should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 182400 (119%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan Black should be quite a bit (about 214%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		213360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 145360 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX Titan Black is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan Black		42672 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15472 (57%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.