GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. 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 GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 59 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTS 150 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is quite a bit (approximately 49%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23040 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be much (about 116%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTS 150, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (116%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.