GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 960 SPUs as well as 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 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 13 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be much better than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57600 (82%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX should be a bit (more or less 16%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6000 (16%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14000 (130%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a 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 colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.