GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically perform quite a bit 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 a lot (about 78%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GTS 150, by far. (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many 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.