GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 960 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (86%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 280 should perform a little bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 13696 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 will be quite a bit (approximately 29%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10960 (29%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (about 29%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GTX 280, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5536 (29%)

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

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