GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 5870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5870, which has GPU clock speed of 850 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1600(320x5) Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti		170 Watts
Radeon HD 5870		188 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5870 is 20% faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		128256 MB/sec
	Difference: 25344 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5870 is quite a bit (more or less 29%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		68000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		52608 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15392 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5870 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5870		27200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti		26304 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 896 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 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 video card will be at handling 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 chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.