GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (more or less 91%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33536 (91%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce GTX 260, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number 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 write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.