GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 960 SPUs, 48 Texture Address Units, 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 590		6680 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 4285 (179%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 238 Watts (187%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 590 should be much faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 200320 (157%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is much (about 109%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40496 (109%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 is quite a bit (more or less 135%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 6850, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 33472 (135%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on 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 reach the maximum fill rate.