GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which has clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 162 Watts (128%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 295 should be 75% quicker than the Radeon HD 6850 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 95776 (75%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 will be quite a bit (approximately 148%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54960 (148%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is superior to the Radeon HD 6850, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7456 (30%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it 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 anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling 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 video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.