GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which has a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (about 133%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132352 (133%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26368 (40%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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