Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 690 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144512 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is much (about 161%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 144640 (161%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32960 (129%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.