GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1408 Stream Processors, 88 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 36 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB should in theory perform a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 280 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 18304 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB is quite a bit (about 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22240 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6336 (33%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.