GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should be 100% quicker than the GeForce GTX 650 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (about 108%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce GTX 650, and very much so. (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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.