In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 6950 XFX Dual-Fan 2GB Edition.

The GTX 770 has a 350 MHz higher core clock speed and 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6950. This results in the GTX 770 providing 76.8 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 770 has a 350 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6950 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 770 providing 11.2 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 770 was released over a year more recently than the HD 6950, and so the GTX 770 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 6950.

The GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition and the Radeon HD 6950 XFX Dual-Fan 2GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 770 has 70.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6950, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 770 is much better than the HD 6950.

The GeForce GTX 770 Zotac AMP! Edition has 1536 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6950 XFX Dual-Fan 2GB Edition has 1408. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 770 is 1846 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6950 is 563. The GTX 770 having 1283 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 770 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6950.

The GTX 770 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6950. This means that the GTX 770 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6950.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 770 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6950. The GTX 770 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 6950. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 770 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6950.