GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 89 Watts (45%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 295, in theory, should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 63776 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is much (about 31%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21760 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6656 (26%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at 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 can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.