GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 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% quicker than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm overall, 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 much (about 104%) more effective 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 is a lot (more or less 75%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.