GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7950 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a lot (more or less 24%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.