GeForce 8800 GS vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GS		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be much faster than the GeForce 8800 GS overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (more or less 41%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GS. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (41%)

Pixel Rate

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

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GS		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18200 (276%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.