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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 has core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 500 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 12 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 116 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 should be 900% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (about 167%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44000 (167%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (approximately 288%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19000 (288%)

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

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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

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Radeon HD 6950

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512	Radeon HD 6950
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	September 2008	December 2010
Code Name	G92	Cayman Pro
Memory	512 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	550 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Speed	1000 MHz	5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	84 watts	200 watts
Bandwidth	16000 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	26400 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	6600 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	96	1408
Texture Mapping Units	48	88
Render Output Units	12	32
Bus Type	DDR2	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Transistors	754 million	2640 million
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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

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