GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs 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 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 92 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 is 1% faster than the GeForce GTX 275 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 will be much (more or less 36%) more effective 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

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the GeForce GTX 275, by far. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core 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 lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.