GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that 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 bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 960 SPUs, 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 GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 300% faster than the GeForce GTS 150 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 should be much (about 27%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10160 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a lot (more or less 109%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 150, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12960 (109%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out 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 graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.