GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this specific card. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		202 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 48 Watts (24%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		111888 MB/sec
	Difference: 64112 (57%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (approximately 104%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		41472 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43008 (104%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216		16128 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12032 (75%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.