GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with a GPU core clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 48112 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (about 91%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33536 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be much (approximately 59%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9472 (59%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster 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 in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.