GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 295 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 40224 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (more or less 28%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26240 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2656 (9%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.