GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has core clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		6013 points
	Difference: 2212 (37%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 120000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be just a bit (more or less 16%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15920 (16%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (more or less 35%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7640 (35%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.