GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features a clock frequency of 880 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (61%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6970 will be 104% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (104%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (more or less 130%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47680 (130%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14360 (104%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated 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 one second.

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