GeForce GTX 980M vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M should be a lot (more or less 42%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29248 (42%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (more or less 160%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40832 (160%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.