GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 319 Watts (570%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 641% quicker than the GeForce GT 440 3GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 276800 (641%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (more or less 1018%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 145104 (1018%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38864 (273%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.