GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 460 SE overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (47%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (approximately 126%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39200 (126%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 SE, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (23%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.