Geforce GTX 690 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 690		13111 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 10241 (357%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Geforce GTX 690		300 Watts
	Difference: 149 Watts (99%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Geforce GTX 690 is 186% faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		384512 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 250112 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 690 is quite a bit (approximately 365%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		234240 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 183840 (365%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 690 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, by a large margin. (explain)

Geforce GTX 690		58560 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29760 (103%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.