GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 174 Watts (145%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 30% faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
	Difference: 59392 (30%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (about 93%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 1060. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111520 (93%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (more or less 28%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 1060, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20512 (28%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.