GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be 58% faster than the GeForce GTX 570 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
	Difference: 88000 (58%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is quite a bit (approximately 104%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45680 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be a small bit (approximately 14%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.