GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) features a core clock frequency of 650 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 850 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 336 SPUs, 56 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which features clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 460 (OEM) Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 460 (OEM)	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	October 2010	October 2010
Code Name	GF104	Barts Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	650 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	1300 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	850 MHz	1000 MHz
Unified Shaders	336	960
Texture Mapping Units	56	48
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	150 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	108800 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	36400 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	20800 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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