GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which features core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 32%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56000 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be just a bit (about 3%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.