GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. 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 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 106 Watts (236%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 is 950% faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (about 1300%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46800 (1300%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (about 1500%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 27000 (1500%)

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 one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.