GeForce 8800 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		44800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (293%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is quite a bit (about 151%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50880 (151%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (193%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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.