GeForce GT 210 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a core clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It 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)

GeForce GT 210		31 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 219 Watts (706%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GT 210 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 210		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 251200 (1963%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (about 2413%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 210. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 210		4712 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 113688 (2413%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GT 210, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 210		2356 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27244 (1156%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few 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.