GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 15808 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be just a bit (more or less 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, but only just. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (9%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.