GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 650 has clock speeds of 1058 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 384 SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 650 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 650	Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	September 2012	December 2010
Code Name	GK107	Cayman XT
Fab Process	28 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	1058 MHz	880 MHz
Shader Speed	1058 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective)	1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	384	1536
Texture Mapping Units	32	96
Render Output Units	16	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.3	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	64 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	80000 MB/sec	176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33856 Mtexels/sec	84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16928 Mpixels/sec	28160 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.