GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 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 3GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 106080 (79%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be quite a bit (about 164%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55608 (164%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be just a bit (more or less 5%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 470, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (5%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.