GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which features 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 8300 GS (OEM)		40 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 will be 2400% faster than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		6400 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is quite a bit (approximately 3811%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		1800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68600 (3811%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24700 (2744%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.