GeForce GTS 150 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with GPU clock speed of 775 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 960 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (11%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6850 will be 300% quicker than the GeForce GTS 150 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 150		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is quite a bit (approximately 27%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10160 (27%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is superior to the GeForce GTS 150, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12960 (109%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.