GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 94 Watts (89%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 is 177% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 102272 (177%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (about 181%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45344 (181%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be quite a bit (more or less 104%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13072 (104%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.