GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 470 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
	Difference: 26080 (19%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot (more or less 107%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36408 (107%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a little bit (approximately 5%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 470, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1320 (5%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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