GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4757 (166%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be quite a bit (more or less 43%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21728 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be quite a bit (approximately 25%) better at AA than the Radeon HD 6870, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7264 (25%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes 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 ability to get to the max fill rate.