GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 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

GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
Radeon R7 260X		4381 points
	Difference: 6486 (148%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
Radeon R7 260X		95 Sol/s
	Difference: 167 (176%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
Radeon R7 260X		14 Mh/s
	Difference: 5 (36%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970 is 115% quicker than the Radeon R7 260X in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 120000 (115%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (approximately 77%) better at AF than the Radeon R7 260X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47600 (77%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be quite a bit (more or less 282%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (282%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.