GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be much (about 109%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57000 (109%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be a lot (about 190%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (190%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.