GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 81024 (51%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is a lot (more or less 73%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37760 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB will be quite a bit (about 23%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4864 (23%)

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 transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.