GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 570 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be quite a bit (about 60%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26480 (60%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 570 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.