GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. 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)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is 89% quicker than the GeForce GTX 275 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 112992 (89%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is a lot (approximately 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38960 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is superior to the GeForce GTX 275, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7876 (44%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.