GeForce 9800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which features core speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 91% faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (91%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a bit (about 17%) better at AF than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7200 (17%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 9800 GTX, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18000 (167%)

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 moved across the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a 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 worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.