Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 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 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 4180 (120%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 55 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be a little bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16256 (9%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be quite a bit (more or less 52%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44288 (52%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be a bit (approximately 14%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6970, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4032 (14%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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