GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which features a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (61%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 177600 (206%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit (about 222%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81600 (222%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15800 (114%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at 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 card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. 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 max fill rate.