Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The Geforce GTX 670 features a GPU clock speed of 915 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory is set to run at 1500 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1344 Stream Processors, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied 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 higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.