Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 680 will be 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32256 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is much (about 83%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58368 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and very much so. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6592 (26%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.