GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 159 Watts (118%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 193920 (312%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 458%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92). (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 190400 (458%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 82400 (792%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.