GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 127744 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 341%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 179392 (341%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (about 253%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66496 (253%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.