Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 4180 (120%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16256 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (approximately 52%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44288 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be a bit (about 14%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4032 (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.