GeForce GTX 960 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1120 SPUs as well as 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

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
Radeon HD 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 4757 (166%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (26%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 6870 should be a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 960 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 will be much (about 43%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21728 (43%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 should be quite a bit (about 25%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6870, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7264 (25%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.