GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 is 23% faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is just a bit (more or less 5%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1968 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (about 69%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10112 (69%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.