GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with core speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. 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 GTS (G80) 640MB		143 Watts
	Difference: 16 Watts (13%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		63360 MB/sec
	Difference: 64640 (102%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (approximately 51%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		24624 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12576 (51%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be quite a bit (more or less 142%) better at AA than the GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) 640MB		10260 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14540 (142%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.