GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 is 72% faster than the GeForce GTX 465 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 73408 (72%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be quite a bit (approximately 216%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57772 (216%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8736 (45%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.