GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 7990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7990, which comes with a clock frequency of 950 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 7990		15520 points
GeForce GTX 980		13552 points
	Difference: 1968 (15%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		32 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 980		20 Mh/s
	Difference: 12 (60%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon HD 7990		513 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 980		408 Sol/s
	Difference: 105 (26%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 7990		375 Watts
	Difference: 210 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7990 should in theory be a lot better than the GeForce GTX 980 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		576000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 352000 (157%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7990 is a lot (approximately 69%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 980. (explain)

Radeon HD 7990		243200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 99072 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon HD 7990, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7990		60800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11264 (19%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.