GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 980 should be 40% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (approximately 105%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 73728 (105%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 46464 (182%)

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 moved over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.