Radeon HD 5970 vs GeForce GTX 960

Radeon HD 5970
Memory: 1024Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 18 Nov 2009
Radeon HD 5970
GeForce GTX 960
Memory: 2048Mb GDDR5DESKTOP
Release date: 22 Jan 2015
GeForce GTX 960

Summary

Synthetic performance index

  • Radeon HD 5970
    100%
  • GeForce GTX 960
    140%

Relative performance

Reasons to consider Radeon HD 5970

Based on an outdated architecture (ATI TeraScale), there are no performance optimizations for current games and applications

Reasons to consider GeForce GTX 960

174 watts lower power draw. This might be a strong point if your current power supply is not enough to handle the Radeon HD 5970 .
This is a much newer product, it might have better long term support.
Around 40% higher average synthetic performance.
Supports PhysX
Supports G-Sync
Supports ShadowPlay (allows game streaming/recording with minimum performance penalty)
Based on an outdated architecture (Nvidia Maxwell), there may be no performance optimizations for current games and applications

GeForce GTX 960

HWBench recommends GeForce GTX 960

The GeForce GTX 960 is the better performing card based on the synthetic benchmarks used (1 benchmarks).


Specifications

Core Configuration

Radeon HD 5970GeForce GTX 960
GPU NameHemlock (Hemlock XT)vsGM206 (GM206-300-A1)
Fab Process40 nmvs28 nm
Die Size334 mm²vs228 mm²
Transistors2,154 millionvs2,940 million
Shaders1600vs1024
Compute Units20vs8
Core clock725 MHzvs1127 MHz
ROPs32vs32
TMUs80vs64

Memory Configuration

Radeon HD 5970GeForce GTX 960
Memory TypeGDDR5vsGDDR5
Bus Width256 bit x2vs128 bit
Memory Speed1000 MHz
4000 MHz effective
vs1753 MHz
7012 MHz effective
Memory Size1024 Mbvs2048 Mb

Additional details

Radeon HD 5970GeForce GTX 960
TDP294 wattsvs120 watts
Release Date18 Nov 2009vs22 Jan 2015

Raw Performance comparison

Pixel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5970
    46.40 GP/s
  • GeForce GTX 960
    36.10 GP/s

GigaPixels - higher is better

Texel Rate

  • Radeon HD 5970
    116.00 GT/s
  • GeForce GTX 960
    72.10 GT/s

GigaTexels - higher is better

Memory bandwidth

  • Radeon HD 5970
    256.00 GB/s
  • GeForce GTX 960
    112.20 GB/s

GB/s - higher is better

Single precision performance

  • Radeon HD 5970
    4640.00 GFLOPs
  • GeForce GTX 960
    2308.10 GFLOPs

GFLOPs - higher is better

Synthetic benchmarks

3DMark 11

  • Radeon HD 5970
    7410
  • GeForce GTX 960
    10380

Points (higher is better)