GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running 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

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 465 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (more or less 216%) faster with regards to 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

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (approximately 45%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 465, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.