GeForce GT 210 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all 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 runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this 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 210		31 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 263 Watts (848%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 is 1900% faster than the GeForce GT 210 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 210		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (about 4824%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 227288 (4824%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (about 3839%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GT 210, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 90444 (3839%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.