GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features GPU clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		202 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 173 Watts (86%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 208112 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (about 284%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 117888 (284%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 36992 (229%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.