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 as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 1060 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 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

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 1060, and very much so. (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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.