GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs GeForce GTX 950

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a speed of 999 MHz on this particular model. It features 216 SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 950, which comes with a core clock speed of 1024 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1652 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 768 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.