GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs 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 as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 980M		9476 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 6236 (192%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 is 25% quicker than the GeForce GTX 980M in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be quite a bit (more or less 42%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29248 (42%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40832 (160%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.