GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a clock speed of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (62%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (more or less 171%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 53280 (171%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (about 35%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 SE, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7360 (35%)

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 moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.