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Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 comes with a GPU clock speed of 1006 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1502 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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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

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 680 should be 9% quicker than the Radeon HD 6970 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is quite a bit (approximately 52%) better at anisotropic filtering 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 is a bit (about 14%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be 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

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Geforce GTX 680

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Radeon HD 6970

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	Geforce GTX 680	Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	March 2012	December 2010
Code Name	GK104	Cayman XT
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	1006 MHz	880 MHz
Memory Speed	6008 MHz	5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	195 watts	250 watts
Bandwidth	192256 MB/sec	176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	128768 Mtexels/sec	84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32192 Mpixels/sec	28160 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	1536	1536
Texture Mapping Units	128	96
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	40 nm
Transistors	3540 million	2640 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.0	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

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