GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which has a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

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 6950		3240 points
GeForce GTX 650		2263 points
	Difference: 977 (43%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 136 Watts (213%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 650 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (more or less 108%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36544 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8672 (51%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.