GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which has core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 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 8800 Ultra		171 Watts
	Difference: 44 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should theoretically be a lot better than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		103680 MB/sec
	Difference: 24320 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is just a bit (approximately 5%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce 8800 Ultra		39168 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1968 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be much (more or less 69%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 Ultra		14688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10112 (69%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.