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 frequency of 999 MHz on this particular card. It features 216 SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 28 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 950, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 1024 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1652 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 768 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.