GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 465 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 57408 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be quite a bit (about 164%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 43692 (164%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the GeForce GTX 465, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6176 (32%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher 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 that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.