GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this specific card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 85% quicker than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (85%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a lot (about 91%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33600 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a lot (about 86%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11800 (86%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.