GeForce GTX 560 Ti vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 822 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1002 MHz on this particular model. It features 384 SPUs as well as 64 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6850 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	January 2011	October 2010
Code Name	GF114	Barts Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	822 MHz	775 MHz
Shader Speed	1645 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1002 MHz (4008 MHz effective)	1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	384	960
Texture Mapping Units	64	48
Render Output Units	32	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	170 watts	127 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	128256 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	52608 Mtexels/sec	37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	26304 Mpixels/sec	24800 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.