GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 280 features core clock speeds of 602 MHz on the GPU, and 1107 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features a clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 280 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 280	Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	June 17, 2008	December 2010
Code Name	G200	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	602 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	1296 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1107 MHz	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	240	1408
Texture Mapping Units	80	88
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	236 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	141696 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	48160 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	19264 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few 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.