GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 275		219 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 108% faster than the GeForce GTX 275 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 136992 (108%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (about 134%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67760 (134%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 275, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11876 (67%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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