GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which has a core clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600(320x5) SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 68 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5870 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (37%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is a bit (more or less 6%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 5870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4128 (6%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be a lot (approximately 33%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5870, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (33%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.