GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 125 Watts (167%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is a lot (more or less 552%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59600 (552%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20200 (374%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.