Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Geforce GTX 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4780 (167%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 680 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (approximately 155%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78368 (155%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, but not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3392 (12%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.