GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU core speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 6970		3470 points
GeForce GTX 560		3030 points
	Difference: 440 (15%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 560 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 47872 (37%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (approximately 86%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39120 (86%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a bit (approximately 9%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 560, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2240 (9%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.