GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be a lot faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be just a bit (about 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6400 (33%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.