GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this particular model. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		70 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 81 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should be much faster than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (147%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (about 186%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32800 (186%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (approximately 555%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 1GB		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24400 (555%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.