GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 SPUs, 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 8300 GS (OEM)		40 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 160 Watts (400%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should theoretically be much better than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		6400 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (2400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be quite a bit (approximately 3811%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8300 GS (OEM). (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)		1800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 68600 (3811%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill 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 reach the maximum fill rate.