GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 149 Watts (103%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (more or less 112%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122800 (112%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (more or less 38%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 970, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25600 (38%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out 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 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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.