GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. 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)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 1024 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be much (about 36%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (36%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4864 (23%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

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