GeForce 8500 GT vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which has core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1536 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 205 Watts (456%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 163200 (1275%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be much (more or less 2247%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 80880 (2247%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 is much (more or less 1464%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26360 (1464%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred 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. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called 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, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.