GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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 480		3650 points
	Difference: 4575 (125%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 is 49% faster than the GeForce GTX 480 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 86592 (49%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (approximately 182%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 76400 (182%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be a bit (about 14%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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