Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 features a GPU core speed of 1006 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1502 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. ATi has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

Geforce GTX 680 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	Geforce GTX 680	Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2012	January 2012
Code Name	GK104	Tahiti XT
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	3072 MB
Core Speed	1006 MHz	925 MHz
Shader Speed	1006 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1502 MHz (6008 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1536	2048
Texture Mapping Units	128	128
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	384-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	195 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	192256 MB/sec	264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	128768 Mtexels/sec	118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32192 Mpixels/sec	29600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.