GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6990, which has GPU 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 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 215 Watts (134%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6990 should theoretically be much better than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 204800 (178%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 will be much (about 322%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 121560 (322%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be a lot (more or less 146%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31520 (146%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.