GeForce GT 440 1.5GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 GT 440 1.5GB		840 points
	Difference: 7385 (879%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 220800 (511%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 731%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 104144 (731%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 108%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 440 1.5GB, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 1.5GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15344 (108%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.