GeForce 8800 GTX vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that 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 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce 8800 GTX		155 Watts
	Difference: 4 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 will be 56% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 37%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTX. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		36800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13600 (37%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTX		13800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15000 (109%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.