GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 TAUs, 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

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 650		2263 points
	Difference: 5962 (263%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 186 Watts (291%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 650 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 184000 (230%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is much (approximately 250%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 84544 (250%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 650, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12672 (75%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can 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 colour ROPs by the the core 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.