GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all 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 as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 33 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 460 2GB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 2GB will be a little bit (approximately 2%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (15%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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 maximum fill rate.