GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 295 comes with clock speeds of 576 MHz on the GPU, and 999 MHz on the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 240 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 295 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 295	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 8, 2009	October 2010
Code Name	G200b	Barts Pro
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	896 MB (x2)	1024 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz (x2)	775 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz (x2)	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz (x2)	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	240 (x2)	960
Texture Mapping Units	80 (x2)	48
Render Output Units	28 (x2)	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit (x2)	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	289 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	223776 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	92160 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	32256 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is 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 DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.