GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 should be 385% quicker than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be quite a bit (more or less 573%) better at anisotropic filtering 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

The Radeon HD 7970 is quite a bit (about 573%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface 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 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.