Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which comes with a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 384-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should perform much faster than the Geforce GTX 670 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 will be a small bit (about 14%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12880 (14%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 should be a bit (more or less 14%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 get to the maximum fill rate.