GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950, which features a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 144 Watts (257%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 270% quicker than the GeForce GT 440 3GB overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 116800 (270%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (about 394%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 56144 (394%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (approximately 80%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 440 3GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11344 (80%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.