GeForce GTX 860M vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 860M overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is a little bit (approximately 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering 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 full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 860M, and able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

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