Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 690		13111 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 9871 (305%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Geforce GTX 690 should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 6950 overall. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 224512 (140%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 will be much (more or less 233%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 163840 (233%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32960 (129%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.