GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6950		3240 points
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 1343 (71%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 61504 (62%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (approximately 144%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41600 (144%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is a small bit (more or less 19%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (19%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.