GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which has GPU clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1050 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1120 SPUs, 56 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 480		3650 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 780 (27%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 99 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 480 should perform quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 43008 (32%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a little bit (approximately 20%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8400 (20%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4800 (17%)

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 past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.