GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 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 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 2642 (32%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 2 (11%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a bit (more or less 8%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9200 (8%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (more or less 127%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 37600 (127%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.