GeForce 8400 GS 512MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses 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 8400 GS 512MB		40 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 87 Watts (218%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce 8400 GS 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		6400 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (1900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 615%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8400 GS 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 32000 (615%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8400 GS 512MB		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22200 (854%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. 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 is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.