GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 145 Watts (138%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970, in theory, should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 137600 (358%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is a lot (about 220%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58080 (220%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 21560 (327%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.