In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 6970 HIS IceQ 2GB Edition.

The HD 6970 has a 17 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 780, but the GeForce GTX 780 has 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6970. As a result, the GeForce GTX 780 exhibits a 81.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6970. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 6970 has a 17 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 780, but the GeForce GTX 780 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 6970. As a result, the GeForce GTX 780 exhibits a 13.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 6970. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GeForce GTX 780 was released over a year more recently than the HD 6970, and so the GeForce GTX 780 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 6970.

The GeForce GTX 780 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 6970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GeForce GTX 780 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce GTX 780 has 112.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6970, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is massively better than the HD 6970.

The Radeon HD 6970 HIS IceQ 2GB Edition has 1536 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 780 has 2304. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6970 is 676 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is 2078. The GeForce GTX 780 having 1402 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce GTX 780 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6970.

The GeForce GTX 780 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6970. This means that the GeForce GTX 780 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6970.

The Radeon HD 6970 HIS IceQ 2GB Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 780 requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the HD 6970 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GeForce GTX 780. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.