GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 is 57% faster than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 64112 (57%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (about 104%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43008 (104%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 75%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12032 (75%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.