GeForce GT 1030 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 97 Watts (323%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GT 1030 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
	Difference: 78848 (160%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 is a bit (about 9%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3280 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4560 (23%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.