GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (136%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 206272 (357%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (about 373%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93344 (373%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17072 (136%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.