GeForce GTX 465 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 465		200 Watts
	Difference: 49 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6870 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTX 465 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 465		102592 MB/sec
	Difference: 31808 (31%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be quite a bit (about 89%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 465. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		26708 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23692 (89%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 48%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 465, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 465		19424 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9376 (48%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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.