GeForce 8800 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 along with 128 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		44800 MB/sec
	Difference: 219200 (489%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 252%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84800 (252%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (more or less 208%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20000 (208%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed in one 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 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.