GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 48 TAUs, 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

GeForce GTX 470		2937 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 542 (23%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 88 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 470 should theoretically be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5920 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a small bit (about 9%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3208 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is a small bit (about 2%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 470, and capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 520 (2%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the 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 - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.