GeForce 8800 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

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

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 118400 (206%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (approximately 151%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50880 (151%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a lot (more or less 193%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (193%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 reach the max fill rate.