GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 features a core clock speed of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 999 MHz. It also uses a 448-bit memory bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is comprised of 216 SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 28 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has 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 260 Core 216 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 260 Core 216	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	September 16, 2008	October 2010
Code Name	G200	Barts Pro
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	896 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	216	960
Texture Mapping Units	72	48
Render Output Units	28	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	202 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.