GeForce GT 440 3GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 71 Watts (127%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce GT 440 3GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
	Difference: 84800 (196%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be much (about 161%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 440 3GB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22944 (161%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10544 (74%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.