GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		210 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (5%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much (about 72%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		40992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29408 (72%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 is the winner, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling 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 its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.