GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		350 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (19%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		934298 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 678298 (265%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB is much (more or less 52%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		352800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 120800 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB is superior to the Radeon HD 5970, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce RTX 3080 12 GB		141120 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48320 (52%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.