GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much better than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (more or less 132%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 48080 (132%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.