GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 5327 (65%)

Grand Theft Auto V | 1920x1080 | Very High

GeForce GTX 980		63 FPS
Radeon HD 7970		37 FPS
	Difference: 26 (70%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 1 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 40000 (18%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be a lot (more or less 22%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25728 (22%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42464 (143%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour 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 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.