GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 560		3030 points
	Difference: 5195 (171%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 560 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 135872 (106%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 161%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73040 (161%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one 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 video 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 the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.