GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that 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 features 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 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 56320 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (approximately 80%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31232 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (about 74%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10912 (74%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one 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 this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.