GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7950, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 SPUs, 112 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

Radeon HD 7950		7731 points
GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
	Difference: 104 (1%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		235 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
	Difference: 81 (53%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7950		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 960		11 Mh/s
	Difference: 10 (91%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7950 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (114%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 should be a lot (about 24%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17472 (24%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10464 (41%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.