In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6950 PowerColor 1GB Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition.

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

The 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 GTX 470 has 256 MB more video memory than the HD 6950, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

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

The Radeon HD 6950 PowerColor 1GB Edition has 1408 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6950 is 563 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582. The GTX 470 having 19 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6950 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 6950 PowerColor 1GB Edition requires 200 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6950 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470. The GTX 470 requires 15 Watts more than the 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 HD 6950.