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Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The Geforce GTX 680 features 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 features 1536 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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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

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be a small bit better than 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 should be a lot (about 52%) more effective 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 should be just a bit (about 14%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6970, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.

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