GeForce GTX 580 3GB vs Radeon HD 6850

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6850, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 775 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 960 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6850		127 Watts
GeForce GTX 580 3GB		244 Watts
	Difference: 117 Watts (92%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 580 3GB should perform a lot faster than the Radeon HD 6850 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		192384 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64384 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a lot (about 33%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		49408 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		37200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12208 (33%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 580 3GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 580 3GB		37056 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6850		24800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12256 (49%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.