GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs GeForce GTX 950

Intro

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

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 950, which has a clock speed of 1024 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1652 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 768 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.