GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with 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 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 30720 (30%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (about 29%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11232 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14112 (96%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.