GeForce GT 210 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1600 SPUs along with 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 GT 210		31 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 263 Watts (848%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GT 210 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 210		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 243200 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 4824%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 227288 (4824%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 90444 (3839%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. 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 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of 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.