GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this model. 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 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (more or less 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

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a better choice, and very much so. (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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 max fill rate.