GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features 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 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 72320 (70%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 116%) better at AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45312 (116%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13472 (92%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.