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GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 480 uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 924 MHz on this particular model. It features 480 SPUs as well as 60 Texture Address Units and 48 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 480 250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970 294 Watts
Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 44% faster than the GeForce GTX 480 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480 177408 MB/sec
Difference: 78592 (44%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 452%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480 42000 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 190000 (452%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 480, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970 92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 480 33600 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 59200 (176%)

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

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 480 Radeon HD 5970
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year March 2010 November 2009
Code Name GF100 Hemlock XT
Memory 1536 MB 1024 MB (x2)
Core Speed 700 MHz 725 MHz (x2)
Memory Speed 3696 MHz 4000 MHz (x2)
Power (Max TDP) 250 watts 294 watts
Bandwidth 177408 MB/sec 256000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 42000 Mtexels/sec 232000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 33600 Mpixels/sec 92800 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 480 1600 (x2)
Texture Mapping Units 60 160 (x2)
Render Output Units 48 64 (x2)
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 384-bit 256-bit (x2)
Fab Process 40 nm 40 nm
Transistors 3000 million 2154 million
Bus PCIe x16 PCIe x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11 DirectX 11
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.1 OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 480

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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