GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 560 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 111872 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 3GB is quite a bit (more or less 98%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44240 (98%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.