In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6950 are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition.

The Radeon HD 6950 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 470. This results in the Radeon HD 6950 providing 34 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 Radeon HD 6950 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 470, but the GTX 470 has 8 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 6950. As a result, the GTX 470 exhibits a 0.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 6950. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 6950 was released less than a year after the GTX 470, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 6950 has 768 MB more video memory than the GTX 470, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 6950 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 6950 has 24 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 470, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 6950 is slightly better than the GTX 470.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6950 has 1408. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6950 is 563. The GTX 470 having 19 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon HD 6950 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6950 requires 200 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Radeon HD 6950. The GTX 470 requires 15 Watts more than the Radeon HD 6950 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 470 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 6950.