GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB features a clock speed of 648 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 1242 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It features 240 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

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 285 1GB 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 285 1GB	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 15, 2009	October 2010
Code Name	G200b	Barts Pro
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	648 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	1476 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1242 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	240	960
Texture Mapping Units	80	48
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	204 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	158976 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	51840 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	20736 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.