GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 4387 (135%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be much better than the GeForce GTX 960 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (43%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is just a bit (approximately 2%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1728 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be quite a bit (about 41%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6950, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10464 (41%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its 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 - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.