GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses 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

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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

The Radeon HD 6950, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than 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 much (about 69%) more effective at AF 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 a better choice, 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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.