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GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The GeForce 8800 GTX makes use of a 90 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 575 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (85%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (about 91%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33600 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (more or less 86%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11800 (86%)

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

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GeForce 8800 GTX

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Radeon HD 6950 2GB

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model	GeForce 8800 GTX	Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	Nov 2006	December 2010
Code Name	G80	Cayman Pro
Memory	768 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	575 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Speed	1800 MHz	5000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	155 watts	200 watts
Bandwidth	86400 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36800 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	13800 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	128	1408
Texture Mapping Units	64	88
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	90 nm	40 nm
Transistors	681 million	2640 million
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.

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