GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 7770

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7770, which features a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1125 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7770		80 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 102 Watts (128%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 260 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 7770 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
Radeon HD 7770		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 39888 (55%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7770 is a bit (more or less 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 7770		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3136 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 will be a little bit (about 1%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7770, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7770		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 128 (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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.