GeForce 8800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which features clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (90%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (more or less 110%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36800 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16000 (167%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.