GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6990, which features a GPU core clock speed of 830 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 175 Watts (88%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6990 should be 212% faster than the GeForce GTX 465 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 217408 (212%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be quite a bit (approximately 497%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 132652 (497%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be quite a bit (approximately 173%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 465, and will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33696 (173%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.