GeForce 8800 Ultra vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6850, which features clock 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 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce 8800 Ultra overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a bit (approximately 5%) more effective at anisotropic 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 is much (more or less 69%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.