GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		108800 MB/sec
	Difference: 211200 (194%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be a lot (about 338%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		36400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122960 (338%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTX 460 (OEM), and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)		20800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32320 (155%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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.