GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with 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 comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically perform a lot faster 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 is much (approximately 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by far. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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