GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 925 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1375 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7970 will be 18% quicker than the GeForce GTX 295 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
	Difference: 40224 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be a lot (more or less 28%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 295. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26240 (28%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be a small bit (approximately 9%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 7970, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2656 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure 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 card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

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