GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 295

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 295, which has clock speeds of 576 MHz on the GPU, and 999 MHz on the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 240 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 28 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 107 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 295 should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 260 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 111888 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (more or less 150%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 260. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55296 (150%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is much (approximately 100%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 260, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16128 (100%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.