GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 320% faster than the GeForce GTS 150 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (320%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a bit (approximately 6%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 150. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3040 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16960 (143%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. 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 rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.