GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a core clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 77 Watts (154%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be much (more or less 745%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32800 (745%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22600 (1027%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.