GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this specific card. 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 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be 25% quicker than the GeForce GTX 880M in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M is a lot (about 73%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51712 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4928 (19%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.