GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 570 comes with a core clock speed of 732 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 950 MHz. It also uses a 320-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 480 SPUs, 60 TAUs, and 40 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 570 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	December 2010	December 2010
Code Name	GF110	Cayman XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1280 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	732 MHz	880 MHz
Shader Speed	1464 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	950 MHz (3800 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	480	1536
Texture Mapping Units	60	96
Render Output Units	40	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	219 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	152000 MB/sec	176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	43920 Mtexels/sec	84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29280 Mpixels/sec	28160 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.