GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 59 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (about 49%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23040 (49%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much (approximately 116%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTS 150, and also able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13760 (116%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.