GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which features GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 725% quicker than the GeForce GTS 150 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232000 (725%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 150%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71040 (150%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 150%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTS 150, and also capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17760 (150%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.