GeForce GTX 880M 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 speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular model. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M should be quite a bit (approximately 73%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51712 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4928 (19%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.