Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a core clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 780		10082 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 6612 (191%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 780 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112384 (64%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 is quite a bit (approximately 96%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81216 (96%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 780 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13264 (47%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 are processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.