GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a core clock frequency of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 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 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 5232 (218%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be a lot (about 94%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34928 (94%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11264 (45%)

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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock 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 better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.