In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 PowerColor OC Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti Gigabyte OC 1GB Edition.

The HD 7970 has a 55 MHz higher core clock speed and 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 560 Ti. This results in the HD 7970 providing 64.6 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7970 has a 55 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 560 Ti and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7970 providing 1.8 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7970 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 560 Ti, and so the HD 7970 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 560 Ti.

The HD 7970 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 560 Ti, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 7970 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7970 has 136 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 560 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7970 is massively better than the GTX 560 Ti.

The Radeon HD 7970 PowerColor OC Edition has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti Gigabyte OC 1GB Edition has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7970 is 1662 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 Ti is 691. The HD 7970 having 971 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7970 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 560 Ti.

The HD 7970 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 560 Ti. This means that the HD 7970 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 560 Ti.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7970.