GeForce GT 230 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 230		65 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 135 Watts (208%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 230 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 230		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (317%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (about 700%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 230. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 230		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 61600 (700%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce GT 230, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 230		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (482%)

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 max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.