GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1600 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 251 Watts (584%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 320 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 230720 (913%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (approximately 1690%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 219040 (1690%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GT 320, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 88480 (2048%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core 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 amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.