GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (194%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (more or less 133%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 980M. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132352 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (approximately 40%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 980M, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26368 (40%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.