GeForce GTX 950M vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7970, which has a clock speed of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 384-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 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 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 950M		3330 points
	Difference: 4895 (147%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 195 Watts (355%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 725% faster than the GeForce GTX 950M overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 232000 (725%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 is a lot (approximately 224%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 950M. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 81840 (224%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14976 (102%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.