GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with GPU core 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 Stream Processors, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 234 Watts (166%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6990 should be much faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 288000 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 is much (about 236%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 112000 (236%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 41280 (349%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.