GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 928 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1350 MHz on this specific card. It features 768 SPUs along with 64 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a core clock frequency 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 is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip 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 Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.