GeForce GTX 570 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 92 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 570, in theory, should be a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (19%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 will be a small bit (approximately 18%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6720 (18%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 is just a bit (more or less 18%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4480 (18%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.