GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which has a clock speed 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 comprised 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 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (48%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 97920 (158%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (approximately 69%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92). (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28800 (69%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92), by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (146%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If 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 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 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.