GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with clock 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)

GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		135 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		62080 MB/sec
	Difference: 72320 (116%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (more or less 21%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92). (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		41600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8800 (21%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (approximately 177%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G92), and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G92)		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 18400 (177%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends 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.