GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 480 will be 11% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 17408 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be quite a bit (about 68%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28400 (68%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is superior to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (31%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. 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 faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.