GeForce 8800 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which has clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6850 should be 186% quicker than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		44800 MB/sec
	Difference: 83200 (186%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a small bit (approximately 11%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3600 (11%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6850 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 256MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 15200 (158%)

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

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.