GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 128112 (115%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be quite a bit (more or less 143%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52736 (143%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9472 (59%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.