GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (14%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 48992 (39%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (about 67%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 275. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33840 (67%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 59%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 275, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10436 (59%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.