GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (326%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 340 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 201600 (371%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (about 1218%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 214400 (1218%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (approximately 2009%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 340, and capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 88400 (2009%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.