GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 105024 (66%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 128%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66560 (128%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (more or less 43%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8864 (43%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.