GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 240 GDDR5		70 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 180 Watts (257%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 209600 (385%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (about 573%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 100800 (573%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5		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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many 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.