GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 61504 (62%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (approximately 144%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (144%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, but not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (19%)

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.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.