GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 162 Watts (128%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 295 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 95776 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 is a lot (approximately 148%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54960 (148%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be a lot (more or less 30%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7456 (30%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core 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 fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.