Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. 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 GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 124 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should perform much faster than the Geforce GTX 670 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (about 126%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Geforce GTX 670. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 129520 (126%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is much (more or less 217%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Geforce GTX 670, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 63520 (217%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.