GeForce 9800 GTX+ 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 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX+		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (150%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (approximately 79%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9800 GTX+. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37248 (79%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX+		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16352 (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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 ability to reach the maximum fill rate.