GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 11157 (466%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 38 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 980 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be quite a bit (about 287%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 106928 (287%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47264 (191%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.