GeForce GT 640 DDR3 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
GeForce GT 640 DDR3		1560 points
	Difference: 1910 (122%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 640 DDR3		65 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 185 Watts (285%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 640 DDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 640 DDR3		57024 MB/sec
	Difference: 118976 (209%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (about 193%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 640 DDR3. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 640 DDR3		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55680 (193%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 640 DDR3		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (96%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that 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 number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.