GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 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 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
	Difference: 5821 (75%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (5%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
	Difference: 173 (74%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950 should theoretically perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is a lot (more or less 61%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54528 (61%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (more or less 182%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 7950, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46464 (182%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.