GeForce GT 320 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which features GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 84 Watts (195%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 406% quicker than the GeForce GT 320 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
	Difference: 102720 (406%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (approximately 187%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24240 (187%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20480 (474%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many 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.