GeForce GTX 460 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU 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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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 1GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 148800 (129%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (more or less 213%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80600 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 1GB		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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.