GeForce 9800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 178% quicker than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (more or less 110%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (167%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 number of pixels the video 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.