GeForce GTX 560 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 560 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 810 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1001 MHz on this particular model. It features 336 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 560 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 560	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	May 2011	October 2010
Code Name	GF114	Barts XT
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	810 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	1600 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1001 MHz (4004 MHz effective)	1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	336	1120
Texture Mapping Units	56	56
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128128 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	45360 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	25920 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

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

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 processed in one second.

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