GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a frequency of 999 MHz on this particular card. It features 216 SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6450 (OEM) 1GB, which features a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 160 SPUs, 8 TAUs, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.