GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, 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

GeForce GTX 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 7970		8225 points
	Difference: 4134 (50%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (108%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7970 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
	Difference: 67392 (34%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be a bit (approximately 2%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 7970. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42688 (144%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.