GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti comes with a core clock speed of 822 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1002 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 384 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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