GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all of 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (2%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory be just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		158976 MB/sec
	Difference: 1024 (1%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (more or less 36%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18560 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is much (more or less 23%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 285 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 1GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4864 (23%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.