GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs GeForce GTX 870M

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 comes with a clock frequency of 576 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 999 MHz. It also features a 448-bit bus, and uses a 65 nm design. It is made up of 216 SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 28 Raster Operation Units.

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 870M, which features core speeds of 941 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.