GeForce GTX 295 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 295		289 Watts
	Difference: 138 Watts (91%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 295 should theoretically be much superior to the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		223776 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 89376 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 295 should be a lot (more or less 83%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		92160 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 41760 (83%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 295 is superior to the Radeon HD 6870, but not by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 295		32256 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3456 (12%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.