GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 181 Watts (262%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 340 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 209600 (385%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 573%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 100800 (573%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GT 340, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25200 (573%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result 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 AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.