GeForce GTX 950 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 950 overall. (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 (approximately 141%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 950. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950 is a better choice, 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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.