GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU core speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 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

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 950		6536 points
	Difference: 1689 (26%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7970		21 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 950		10 Mh/s
	Difference: 11 (110%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950		90 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (178%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 950 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950		105728 MB/sec
	Difference: 158272 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be much (more or less 141%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950		49152 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 69248 (141%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950		32768 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3168 (11%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many 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.