GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 127872 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 411%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 186640 (411%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (about 258%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 560, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66880 (258%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.