GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7950 should be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 295 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 16224 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be a small bit (more or less 3%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2560 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a lot (more or less 26%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 7950, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6656 (26%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.