GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which features a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 9489 (331%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 1060 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 62208 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 is quite a bit (more or less 139%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70080 (139%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43488 (151%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that 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 number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.