GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units 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 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 165 Watts (83%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 168320 (105%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be a little bit (about 10%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7296 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 will be much (about 128%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and should be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32672 (128%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one 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 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 maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output 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 max fill rate.