GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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 480		3650 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 180 (5%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480 should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1408 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 101%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42480 (101%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be just a bit (approximately 19%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5440 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.