GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

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

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6970 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
	Difference: 1408 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (approximately 101%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 42480 (101%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 should be a little bit (more or less 19%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6970, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5440 (19%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.