GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (127%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (about 63%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27200 (63%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (approximately 137%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (137%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.