GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. 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 970		10867 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 7997 (279%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 970 should perform much faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is a lot (about 117%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 58800 (117%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 38400 (133%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.