GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 122304 (86%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (about 146%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70240 (146%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (about 54%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 280, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10336 (54%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.