GeForce GT 340 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 58 Watts (84%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 is 135% faster than the GeForce GT 340 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73600 (135%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is quite a bit (approximately 111%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 340. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19600 (111%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (about 464%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 340, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (464%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.