Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs as well as 128 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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 690		13111 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 4886 (59%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 690 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 7970 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
	Difference: 120512 (46%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 should be a lot (more or less 98%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 115840 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28960 (98%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.