GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features 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 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8600 GTS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be much (approximately 552%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59600 (552%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (about 374%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20200 (374%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.