GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 129 Watts (78%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be just a bit better than the GeForce GTX 980 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 61%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87872 (61%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 980, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20736 (29%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.