GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 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 GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 188 Watts (177%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 343% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 198272 (343%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (about 826%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 206944 (826%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (more or less 641%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 450, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80272 (641%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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 potential to get to the max fill rate.