GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. 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)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 82 Watts (182%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115200 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be quite a bit (more or less 933%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33600 (933%)

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 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23000 (1278%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.