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

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features a core clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should be 178% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 320MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 243%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, and very much so. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.