GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
GeForce GTX 590		6680 points
	Difference: 1051 (16%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7950 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88320 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a bit (about 15%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11904 (15%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32672 (128%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.