GeForce GTX 460 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this model. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 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 6870		2870 points
GeForce GTX 460		2557 points
	Difference: 313 (12%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 460		150 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 1 Watts (1%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6870 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 460 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 460		86400 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (56%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 will be a lot (more or less 33%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 460. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12600 (33%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is much (approximately 78%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GTX 460, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 460		16200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12600 (78%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.