GeForce GTX 285 1GB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 285 1GB comes with a clock frequency of 648 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 1242 MHz. It also uses a 512-bit bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is comprised of 240 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which features a core clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 285 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6870 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 285 1GB	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 15, 2009	October 2010
Code Name	G200b	Barts XT
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	648 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	1476 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1242 MHz	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	240	1120
Texture Mapping Units	80	56
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	204 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	158976 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	51840 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	20736 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.