GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all 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 as well as 96 TAUs 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 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 10082 (291%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 85 Watts (52%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (27%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be quite a bit (about 71%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59648 (71%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen 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 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43904 (156%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 texture units 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 one second.

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