GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which has 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

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 56320 (54%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is much (about 80%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 31232 (80%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10912 (74%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.