Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 4410 (136%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Geforce GTX 680 should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 6950 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32256 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 should be much (about 83%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58368 (83%)

Pixel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 is quite a bit (about 26%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6592 (26%)

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 max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.