GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (740%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be much (more or less 473%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (473%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 9500 GT DDR2, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT DDR2		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (555%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high 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 speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 number of pixels the video card could possibly record 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.