GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6870, which has 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		105 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 46 Watts (44%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 6870 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 76800 (133%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 should be much (more or less 50%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 19200 (200%)

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 transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the 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 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

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