Geforce GTX 770 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The Geforce GTX 770 has a core clock speed of 1046 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1753 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a core clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.