GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) in general. (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 (about 132%) more effective at 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

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a lot (more or less 35%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.