GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this specific model. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 98 Watts (109%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 will be 45% quicker than the GeForce GTX 950 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 47872 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 38%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18848 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950 should be a small bit (more or less 20%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 5870, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5568 (20%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed 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 this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.