GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a GPU core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 960 Stream Processors, 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 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (22%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 41600 (48%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a bit (more or less 1%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 80%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTX, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11000 (80%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated 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 video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.