GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with core speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		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 better than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 155200 (143%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (more or less 225%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 82000 (225%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (42%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.