GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 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 GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 194 Watts (346%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 440 3GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 132800 (307%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 493%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70224 (493%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 98%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 440 3GB, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13904 (98%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 card could 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 ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.