GeForce GTX 1070 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with clock speeds of 925 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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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 1070		18174 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 9949 (121%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1070		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 1% quicker than the GeForce GTX 1070 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1070		262144 MB/sec
	Difference: 1856 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1070 is much (approximately 53%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1070		180720 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62320 (53%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1070 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1070		96384 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 66784 (226%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.