GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this model. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 155 Watts (344%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 1150% quicker than the GeForce 8500 GT overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 147200 (1150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (approximately 1856%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66800 (1856%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23800 (1322%)

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 moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.