GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 153 Watts (109%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224000 (700%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 390%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 184640 (390%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (about 684%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 80960 (684%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.