GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should theoretically be much superior to 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 using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, 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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the 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 core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.