GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 131 Watts (190%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 340 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105600 (194%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is much (about 300%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52800 (300%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21200 (482%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.