GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that 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

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTS 450		1453 points
	Difference: 6772 (466%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (approximately 373%) better at AF than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		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		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed 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 the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.