GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7950, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 7950		200 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 7950, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		240000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 128112 (115%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 will be much (about 116%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		89600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48128 (116%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7950 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9472 (59%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.