GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6850, which comes with a core clock speed of 775 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 960 SPUs, 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

GeForce GTX 470		2937 points
Radeon HD 6850		2395 points
	Difference: 542 (23%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 88 Watts (69%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 470 should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5920 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 should be a small bit (about 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3208 (9%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6850 will be a small bit (more or less 2%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 470, and also will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 520 (2%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a 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. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.