GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5870, which features core clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600(320x5) SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 98 Watts (109%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 47872 (45%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 will be a lot (more or less 38%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18848 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is the winner, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5568 (20%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record 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 sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.