GeForce GTX 260 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 has a clock frequency of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 999 MHz. It also features a 448-bit bus, and makes use of a 65 nm design. It features 192 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 28 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which features GPU core speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 960 SPUs, 48 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation 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 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	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	June 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	192	960
Texture Mapping Units	64	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)	182 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36864 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.