GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features GPU core 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 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 279%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 87200 (279%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (approximately 42%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 SE, and able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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 bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.