GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 should be 61% quicker than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 97024 (61%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (more or less 348%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 180160 (348%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 72064 (348%)

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 over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.