Geforce GTX 670 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The Geforce GTX 670 features a clock frequency of 915 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1500 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1344 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 670 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores

Specifications

Model	Geforce GTX 670	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	May 2012	October 2010
Code Name	GK104	Barts XT
Fab Process	28 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe x16
Memory	2048 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	915 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	915 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1500 MHz (6000 MHz effective)	1050 MHz (4200 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	1344	1120
Texture Mapping Units	112	56
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.2	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	170 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	192000 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	102480 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	29280 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.