GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6990

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6990, which features core clock speeds of 830 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
Radeon HD 6990		375 Watts
	Difference: 139 Watts (59%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6990 will be 126% faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
	Difference: 178304 (126%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6990 should be much (more or less 231%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 280. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		159360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 111200 (231%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6990 is superior to the GeForce GTX 280, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6990		53120 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33856 (176%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.