GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5970, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5970 will be 14% quicker than the GeForce GTX 295 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 32224 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be much (about 152%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 139840 (152%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 60544 (188%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per 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. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.