GeForce GTX Titan vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX Titan		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX Titan should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32384 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (approximately 24%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX Titan. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		187488 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44512 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		40176 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 52624 (131%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.