GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (344%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is 150% quicker than the GeForce GTX 860M overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be just a bit (more or less 9%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6112 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (approximately 101%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 860M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12848 (101%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card 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 number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per 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 - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.