GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 is 70% faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (more or less 116%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (approximately 92%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.