GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this card. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		210 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5870 should theoretically be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (7%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is a lot (about 66%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		40992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27008 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 is superior to the Radeon HD 5870, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (8%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.