GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5970, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 189 Watts (180%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 198400 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 590%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 198400 (590%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 867%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 83200 (867%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.