GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which features 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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is 31% faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (more or less 32%) more effective at AF 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 should be a bit (more or less 3%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5970, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.