GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which comes with a core clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		250 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should be 31% quicker than the Radeon HD 5970 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		336000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 32%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980 Ti		176000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56000 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be a small bit (more or less 3%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5970, and able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980 Ti		96000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (3%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.