GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be a lot superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be quite a bit (more or less 1045%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46000 (1045%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26600 (1209%)

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 MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.