GeForce GTX 960M vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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

GeForce GTX 960M		4350 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 880 (25%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 will be 175% quicker than the GeForce GTX 960M overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 112000 (175%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 93%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40640 (93%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10624 (61%)

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. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few 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.