GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 5970 should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 112%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 970, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.