GeForce GTX 580 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. 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)

GeForce GTX 580		244 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 33% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 580		192384 MB/sec
	Difference: 63616 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be much (about 370%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 580. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		49408 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 182592 (370%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (about 150%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 580, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 580		37056 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 55744 (150%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.