GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (122%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be much better than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (more or less 126%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (146%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.