Geforce GTX 680 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which has core clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator 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 680		7650 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4780 (167%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
Geforce GTX 680		195 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Geforce GTX 680 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		192256 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 57856 (43%)

Texel Rate

The Geforce GTX 680 will be quite a bit (about 155%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		128768 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78368 (155%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Geforce GTX 680 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, though not by far. (explain)

Geforce GTX 680		32192 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3392 (12%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.