GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 TAUs, 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 980		13552 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 10682 (372%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (9%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 should be a lot (more or less 186%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 93728 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 980 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43264 (150%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.