GeForce GTX 980M 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 clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1250 MHz on this particular card. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 980M		100 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 980M overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 980M		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32000 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be quite a bit (approximately 42%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		99648 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29248 (42%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980M will be a lot (approximately 160%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980M		66432 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 40832 (160%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.