GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 204 Watts (227%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 150272 (142%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (approximately 372%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 182848 (372%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be a lot (approximately 183%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 950, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 60032 (183%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.