GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 111872 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be much (more or less 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44240 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.