GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units 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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 7397 (213%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (27%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be quite a bit (about 29%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24720 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is quite a bit (more or less 139%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 39040 (139%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.