GeForce GTX 275 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 275		219 Watts
	Difference: 92 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6850, in theory, should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 275 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 275		127008 MB/sec
	Difference: 992 (1%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 275 is quite a bit (about 36%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 275		50640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13440 (36%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is a lot (more or less 40%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce GTX 275, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 275		17724 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7076 (40%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.