Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1250 MHz on this card. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Geforce GTX 670		170 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 670 will be 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		192000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (20%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 670 is much (about 46%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32080 (46%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 670 is a better choice, but not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 670		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3680 (14%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.