GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 280 has a clock frequency of 602 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 1107 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is comprised of 240 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which makes use of a 40 nm design. ATi has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 280 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6970 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 280	Radeon HD 6970
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	June 17, 2008	December 2010
Code Name	G200	Cayman XT
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	602 MHz	880 MHz
Shader Speed	1296 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1107 MHz	1375 MHz
Unified Shaders	240	1536
Texture Mapping Units	80	96
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	512-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	236 watts	250 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	141696 MB/sec	176000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	48160 Mtexels/sec	84480 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	19264 Mpixels/sec	28160 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.