GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm uses a 55 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 999 MHz on this particular card. It features 216 SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.