GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 7997 (279%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 970 should theoretically perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be much (approximately 117%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58800 (117%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be quite a bit (approximately 133%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6870, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (133%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour 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 many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.