GeForce GTX 880M vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which has a core clock speed of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It features 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 880M		130 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 70 Watts (54%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 880M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 880M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 880M will be a lot (more or less 73%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		122112 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 51712 (73%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 880M is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 880M		30528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4928 (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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a 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 figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.