GeForce GTX 650 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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

Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
GeForce GTX 650		2263 points
	Difference: 132 (6%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 63 Watts (98%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 60% faster than the GeForce GTX 650 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (60%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is a little bit (more or less 10%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3344 (10%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (more or less 47%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 650, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7872 (47%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.