GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this 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 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 210 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 217600 (567%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (approximately 779%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 205600 (779%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 1306%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 86200 (1306%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.