GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which features a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950, in theory, should be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 295 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 16224 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a little bit (more or less 3%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is quite a bit (more or less 26%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6656 (26%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.