GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 570 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 732 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 950 MHz on this card. It features 480 SPUs as well as 60 TAUs and 40 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. ATi has clocked the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 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 5870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 5870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	December 2010	September 23, 2009
Code Name	GF110	Cypress XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
Memory	1280 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	732 MHz	850 MHz
Shader Speed	1464 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	950 MHz (3800 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	480	1600(320x5)
Texture Mapping Units	60	80
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 3.2
Power (Max TDP)	219 watts	188 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	152000 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	43920 Mtexels/sec	68000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29280 Mpixels/sec	27200 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.