GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 92 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 992 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 will be quite a bit (about 36%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 40%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 275, and also capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7076 (40%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.