GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 465 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 217408 (212%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit (more or less 497%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132652 (497%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33696 (173%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.