GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with GPU core speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 GTS 450		1453 points
	Difference: 4367 (301%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 269 Watts (254%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6990, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 262272 (454%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (more or less 536%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 134304 (536%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40592 (324%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per 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 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 rate is also dependant on many 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.