GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with GPU clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised 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 GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (77%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should be much faster than the GeForce GTS 150 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (more or less 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

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 138%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.