GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, 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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 480 should in theory be a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6970 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (more or less 101%) faster with regards to 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

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 6970, but only just. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.