GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 GS in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (about 220%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58080 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GS, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21560 (327%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.