GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has 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 ROPs.

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 much better than the GeForce GTS 450 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (about 373%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.