GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		143 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 107 Watts (75%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 112640 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (more or less 243%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59856 (243%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (approximately 174%) better at AA than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17900 (174%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.