GeForce GTX 1080 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that 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 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1080		180 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 1080, in theory, should be much faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		327680 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 71680 (28%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 should be a little bit (approximately 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		257120 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25120 (11%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 will be a bit (approximately 11%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5970, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		102848 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10048 (11%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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.