GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with a clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6990		5820 points
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 2170 (59%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 480 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
	Difference: 142592 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (about 279%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 117360 (279%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 58%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 480, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19520 (58%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.