GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 56320 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (about 80%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31232 (80%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10912 (74%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.