GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 129% faster than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 148800 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (approximately 213%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80600 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (37%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated 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 graphics card will be at handling 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 one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.