GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 950% quicker than the GeForce 8500 GT in general, because of its higher data rate. (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 (more or less 1300%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is superior to the GeForce 8500 GT, and very much so. (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 maximum amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number 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 speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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