GeForce GTX 1080 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1080		180 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 114 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 1080 should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		327680 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
	Difference: 71680 (28%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1080 should be a small bit (more or less 11%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		257120 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25120 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1080 is superior to the Radeon HD 5970, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1080		102848 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10048 (11%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.