GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 590 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 72320 (28%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 199%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 154304 (199%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 59%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 590, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34528 (59%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.