GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (46%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 should perform much faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 72320 (70%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (about 116%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 45312 (116%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13472 (92%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.