GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1050 MHz on this particular 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 1060		12359 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 9489 (331%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 1060		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 1060 should be 46% faster than the Radeon HD 6870 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		196608 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 62208 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 1060 should be much (about 139%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		120480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 70080 (139%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 1060 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 1060		72288 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 43488 (151%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.