GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. 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 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 123 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 147% faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 152320 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (about 492%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 192832 (492%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 532%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 78112 (532%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.