GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 216SP 55 nm has a GPU core clock speed of 576 MHz, and the 896 MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 999 MHz through a 448-bit bus. It also is made up of 216 Stream Processors, 72 Texture Address Units, and 28 ROPs.

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

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 260 216SP 55 nm 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 260 216SP 55 nm	Radeon HD 6870
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	December 22, 2008	October 2010
Code Name	G200b	Barts XT
Fab Process	55 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	896 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	1050 MHz
Unified Shaders	216	1120
Texture Mapping Units	72	56
Render Output Units	28	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	171 watts	151 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	134400 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	50400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	28800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.