GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 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 590		6680 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 3210 (93%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 115 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 152320 (87%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a small bit (about 9%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6784 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be quite a bit (about 107%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 30112 (107%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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