GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 169600 (196%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 514%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 194200 (514%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 473%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 460, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 76600 (473%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.