GeForce 9400 GT 256MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

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

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 should be 950% quicker than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 121600 (950%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is a lot (more or less 1045%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46000 (1045%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (about 1209%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, and able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26600 (1209%)

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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill 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.