GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 470 comes with a core clock speed of 607 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 837 MHz. It also makes use of a 320-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 448 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 40 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features a clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 470 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 470	Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2010	December 2010
Code Name	GF100	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1280 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	607 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	1215 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	837 MHz	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	448	1408
Texture Mapping Units	56	88
Render Output Units	40	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	215 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	133920 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	33992 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	24280 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.