Geforce GTX 780 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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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 is 80% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall, because of 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 is a lot (approximately 135%) better at AF 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

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 780 is a better choice, by a large margin. (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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, 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 chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.