GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6990, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 830 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 193 Watts (106%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is a lot (approximately 332%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122496 (332%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (approximately 229%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 260, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card 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 colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.