GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with GPU core speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

The Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 465 in general. (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 anisotropic 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 high levels of AA 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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.