GeForce GTX 280 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 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 280		236 Watts
	Difference: 109 Watts (86%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 280 should theoretically be just a bit better than the Radeon HD 6850 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		141696 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 13696 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 280 is quite a bit (about 29%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 280		48160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10960 (29%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 280		19264 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5536 (29%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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