Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
Geforce GTX 780		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 780 should be 80% quicker than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		288384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128384 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 should be quite a bit (approximately 135%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		165696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 95296 (135%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 780 is a lot (more or less 62%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Geforce GTX 780		41424 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15824 (62%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.