In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 5970.
The GeForce GTX 780 has a 138 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 5970. This results in the GeForce GTX 780 providing 49.7 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.
The GeForce GTX 780 has a 138 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 5970, but the Radeon HD 5970 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 780. As a result, the Radeon HD 5970 exhibits a 5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GeForce GTX 780. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.
The GeForce GTX 780 was released over three years more recently than the Radeon HD 5970, and so the GeForce GTX 780 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon HD 5970 when running the latest games.
The GeForce GTX 780 has 1024 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 5970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GeForce GTX 780 also has superior memory performance overall.
The GeForce GTX 780 has 32.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 5970, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is noticeably better than the Radeon HD 5970.
The GeForce GTX 780 has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5970 has 3200. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is 2078 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 5970 is 1508. The GeForce GTX 780 having 570 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce GTX 780 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 5970.
The GeForce GTX 780 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 5970. This means that the GeForce GTX 780 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 5970.
The GeForce GTX 780 requires 250 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5970 requires 294 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GeForce GTX 780 and a PSU with at least 650 Watts for the Radeon HD 5970. The Radeon HD 5970 requires 44 Watts more than the GeForce GTX 780 to run. The difference is significant enough that the Radeon HD 5970 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GeForce GTX 780.