GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs 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 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 9964 (416%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 1060 should be 54% faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 68608 (54%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 is much (approximately 224%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 83280 (224%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 47488 (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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.