GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which has core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 460		2557 points
	Difference: 3263 (128%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (150%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 270% quicker than the GeForce GTX 460 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 233600 (270%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (approximately 322%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 121560 (322%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 228%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 460, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36920 (228%)

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 max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.