GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 be a lot 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 78%) more effective at AF 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 quite a bit (approximately 138%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTS 150, and also will be able to handle higher 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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.