GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 590		6680 points
	Difference: 1545 (23%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64320 (24%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (more or less 52%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40704 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is much (about 97%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28672 (97%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.