GeForce 9600 GT 1GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6990, which comes with a core clock frequency of 830 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 280 Watts (295%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 262400 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (approximately 666%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GT 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 1GB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 138560 (666%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen 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 9600 GT 1GB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 42720 (411%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

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