GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		58 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 236 Watts (407%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		32384 MB/sec
	Difference: 223616 (691%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (about 2220%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 220 GDDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		10000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 222000 (2220%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 220 GDDR3		5000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 87800 (1756%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.