GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 5970, which has a clock speed of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1600 SPUs, 160 Texture Address Units, and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 123 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5970 is 129% faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 144112 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be a lot (about 459%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 190528 (459%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 76672 (475%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.