GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare 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 makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 48112 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (approximately 70%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28928 (70%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be much (more or less 59%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9472 (59%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.