GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 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 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (111%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (about 238%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (238%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (146%)

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 transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.