In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR3 Sapphire Edition.

The HD 5670 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 36 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5670. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 20.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 5670. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5670 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 5670. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 19.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 5670. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 470 was released less than a year after the HD 5670, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 470 has 256 MB more video memory than the HD 5670, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 470 has 110.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5670, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 470 is massively better than the HD 5670.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR3 Sapphire Edition has 400. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5670 is 202. The GTX 470 having 380 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 470 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5670.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR3 Sapphire Edition requires 64 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5670. The GTX 470 requires 151 Watts more than the HD 5670 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 470 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 5670.