GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which features clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

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

The GeForce GTX 480, in theory, should perform a lot 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 just a bit (about 20%) better at anisotropic 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 high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 480 is a better choice, but 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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.