Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a GPU core clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 670 will be 25% quicker than the Radeon HD 5870 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be quite a bit (more or less 51%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be a bit (about 8%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record 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 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.