GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which features core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be 25% quicker than the GeForce GTX 560 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 31872 (25%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be quite a bit (approximately 55%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25040 (55%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 560 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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 information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.