Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 7950 3GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 7950 3GB, which features GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also is made up of 1792 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB should be 25% faster than the Geforce GTX 680 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950 3GB		240000 MB/sec
Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
	Difference: 47744 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (more or less 44%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7950 3GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		89600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39168 (44%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 7950 3GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6592 (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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.