GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a clock frequency of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
GeForce GTS 450		1453 points
	Difference: 1417 (98%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 is 133% faster than the GeForce GTS 450 in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 76672 (133%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (approximately 101%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 25344 (101%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16272 (130%)

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 transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus 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 higher the card's memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.