GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6850, which features core clock speeds of 775 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 48 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
GeForce GTS 450		1453 points
	Difference: 942 (65%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
	Difference: 21 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6850 should in theory be much better than the GeForce GTS 450 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 70272 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 is much (more or less 48%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12144 (48%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a lot (about 98%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTS 450, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12272 (98%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at 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 graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.