GeForce GTX 590 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

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.

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

The GeForce GTX 590, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be much (about 109%) better at AF 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 should be much (more or less 135%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6850, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.