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GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a frequency of 500 MHz on this specific card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, 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

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 900% faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 in general, due to its greater 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 is quite a bit (more or less 167%) better at anisotropic 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 will be quite a bit (approximately 288%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also will be able to handle 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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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