GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which features 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (96%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (135%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is quite a bit (about 644%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200800 (644%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 SE, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 72000 (346%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.