GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 144000 (450%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (approximately 78%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37120 (78%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (about 138%) better at AA than the GeForce GTS 150, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16320 (138%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.