GeForce GTX 285 2GB vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		204 Watts
	Difference: 53 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 285 2GB should be 18% faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		158976 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 24576 (18%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 285 2GB will be a small bit (more or less 3%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 285 2GB		51840 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1440 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6870 is quite a bit (approximately 39%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 285 2GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 285 2GB		20736 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8064 (39%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling 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 video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.